Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Over the past two years, cloud computing services have moved firmly into the mainstream for many enterprises. As well as underpinning flexible and cost-effective services, the cloud provides widespread access to sophisticated application development environments, helping to generate innovative mobile applications for devices such as smartphones and tablets. That in turn is increasing enterprise productivity in many sectors.
But it also means employees can access, from the same mobile devices, enterprise databases that contain sensitive data, as well as unvetted applications from far beyond the company firewall. And it is changing the role of the IT manager, who increasingly is called upon to secure and manage new decentralized services.
Mobile applications sourced and developed outside enterprise IT departments should be subject to the same checks and policies as internal applications to minimize security risks. But this can be daunting for organizations faced with employees who deploy a wide array of cloud-based services and run them on their own devices. Without highly robust and flexible analytics tools that provide real-time information on enterprise data and application usage, enterprise IT managers risk drowning in a tide of new application and device usage.
Fortunately, the cloud can also provide a solution to these challenges. Indeed, tools that help manage the shift toward greater mobility and cloud-based application services need not be onerous or costly to deploy.
SAP Afaria in the Cloud, the new mobile device management (MDM) solution launched at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, illustrates just why software-as-a-service adoption is accelerating: Synergy Research Group, for example, says cloud infrastructure service revenue globally reached U.S.$12.5 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, a rise of 15% from Q4 2011, with Amazon leading the way and accounting for 36% of revenue in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment.
Cloud computing and mobile devices are radically changing the nature of enterprise computing, but when harnessed effectively, they provide new ways for enterprises of all sizes to become more productive and innovative.
Fernando Alvarez is VP at Capgemini Mobile Solutions Practice Leader
