“The challenge when moving mobility out to the cloud is twofold,” says Michael Skaff, CIO of the San Francisco Symphony. “There’s the potential increase of architectural complexity and vendor management complexity, given the potential web of inter-related vendor agreements and service architectures; and the need to guard against the diffusion of ownership or responsibility.”
CIOs can postulate about the impact to each organization only generally. “The actual impact of cloud adoption will depend on each organization’s mix of platforms, services, and compliance requirements,” Skaff adds.
There’s another issue complicating the mobile/cloud marriage: device ownership.
“We no longer live in a world where employees only conduct work through their company-issued devices,” says Nathan McNeill, co-founder and vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing at Bomgar, an enterprise remote support company. “Some companies are even turning to a Bring Your Own Computer or BYOC model.”
This is significantly changing how enterprises need to think about IT support. “IT support teams now need to be skilled on a much broader variety of platforms and leverage technology, such as remote support, that allow them to physically see and quickly resolve issues employees are having on their mobile devices,” adds McNeill.
So how are IT managers handling all this as they move to the cloud? For the moment, they’re just doing the best they can as no hard rules have formed yet.
“A trend I see developing is that major carriers worldwide are beginning to make their network services available using standards-based Web service and RESTful APIs,” says Jeff Barber, senior consultant in the Mobility Solutions group at Slalom Consulting, a business and technology consulting firm. “These APIs are complimentary to cloud computing solutions, in that an enterprise or small business would no longer need to make the large investment in time and money required to connect directly to carriers core messaging, location, and other types of network capabilities.”
“This opens up exciting new opportunities to rapidly deploy network services such as MMS or device location in enterprise applications and to extend those applications beyond the handset onto PDAs, iPads, laptops, and Internet-enabled televisions for example; and the success of this approach requires having an accurate database of the business’ devices and their network services capabilities,” he explained.
Yes, the opportunities are exciting – and so are the pitfalls. The best thing to do now is to predict cloud impact and adapt your mobile management plans so you’re not left all wet.
“Take 3.5 billion unsophisticated users around the world, and give them powerful mobile consumer devices that represent the new computer, but with not a tad of security,” says Winn Schwartau, a leading expert on information security and cyber-terrorism and chairman of the board of M.A.D. (Mobile Active Defense).
“Then connect them across dozens of inherently insecure backbones, attach half of them to corporate and government networks for both personal and business use. But don’t forget the bad guys are coming,” says Schwartau. “They know a sweet deal when they see one.”
Related Information From Dell.com: Your Mobility Strategy.
       
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