More Mobility Means Happier Workers, More Issues for Business IT

Mformation (News - Alert) recently put together a good white paper, titled “Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions From the Cloud,” noting that there is a growing momentum for enterprises to run an increasing number of computing elements in the IT domain from the cloud.

This includes software and platforms as well as infrastructure elements, but of course software takes the largest bite of the market share in the cloud. And as the report finds, cloud-based software will gain increasing traction, and mobility management will be an important area for such cloud-based offerings.How big will enterprise cloud-based services be? The paper cites one estimate of $35.6 billion by 2015, and another estimate that by 2014, cloud-based deployments will increase by 100 percent, to about $25 billion. That’s the size of the market we’re talking about here.

As the paper says, there are a number of areas which will “increasingly be supported by cloud-based deployments,” with enterprise mobility a particularly well-suited area, specifically mobile device management. This deals with mobile devices and how they’re used by employees, and includes such considerations as security, capability, and wireless usage and cost.

The paper finds that there are quite a few reasons why enterprise mobility management products work well with cloud-based deployments, such as the rapid rate of change in mobility tech, the trend towards mobile consumerization within the enterprise and what it calls “the considerable differences between wireless and traditional IT protocols, standards and technologies.”

Of course employees like the flexibility mobile brings, and employers like the increased productivity happy employees bring, but even still, the rate of chante in acceptance of mobile computing has been “phenomenal,” as the paper finds. The speed of change is high, especially in the smartphone market, and a growing number of computing devices support cellular connectivity – notebooks supporting cellular and Wi-Fi capability, for instance.

Consumerization – obviously smartphones, netbooks and tablets are mass-market items these days, which means enterprise requirements for them are “lagging somewhat in the development cycle,” since the first priority is consumers. The result is that businesses let employees use their personal devices for work, which means there are security and standards issues aplenty to keep IT busy.

So the paper concludes that what’s needed for cloud-based tools are on-demand self-service so people can set them up themselves, broad network access, resource pooling for multiple tenants, elasticity – the ability to support any number of devices.

Cloud-based offerings from MSPs, the paper finds, will deliver the generic benefits of a cloud-based model as well as help solve such challenges as the myriad service contracts businesses will face with an increasingly mobile workforce.

Click here to check out the white paper.