Now back from my brief trip to the West Coast, I am done digging myself out of what was an impressive (depressing?) amount of things that piled up on me in just two days.
As you know, Twitter has become an impressive tool for real-time knowledge (or almost anything else for that matter)sharing. I saw a tweet today from the people at InformationWeek that caught my eye: Web May Be Ultimate Mobile Platform. Needless to say, it made me think about the potential impact on enterprise mobility. I'm talking Mobile Cloud Computing.
Now, this is not of course the first time I think about the cloud and its impact on enterprise mobility. In the past, I've spoken about how I think the cloud makes enterprise mobility compelling. Now, there's a conference called MobileBeat 2009 taking place today in San Francisco. Many industry heavyweights are there, including Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, and Google (among others) and they are all talking about the impact of The Web and HTML 5 on mobile platforms.
Back in February, I penned a little article that asked if one should care about the mobile platform. I think that the major players are coming to see how The Cloud does in many respects level the playing field. In fact, even from an enterprise perspective, it becomes less a question of which device you prefer, but instead which BROWSER works best for you. Heck, even today, RIM announced that its new browser would support tabbed browsing (it's about time if you ask me).
So this has, in my opinion, some pretty big implications on device and application management. While there will always be a need for baseline device management (especially if you use direct access email), but what if (almost) no data is on the device because all the applications you are using are in The Cloud? Application Management becomes all but moot. You won't need to worry about pushing applications out to employees and making sure they get all the latest updates. You won't need either to (necessarily) create applications that work on a specific smartphone platform...instead, you'll need to make sure it works best with the popular browsers. Hmm, sounds like the Browser Wars of yore.
What does increase in complexity is device SECURITY. Why? It's all about where the data that you will be accessing will reside. With HTML 5, you'll be able to cache data temporarily on the device should you lose coverage. That's great, except for the fact that it creates a real threat in terms of data breaches. Device encryption becomes critical. So does authorization and authentication in terms of being able to access the data. Depending on the setup, VPNs may be necessary. And last, but certainly not least, you need remote wipe capabilities. Otherwise, can you imagine what would happen? I don't even want to begin to think about it...it would be like TJX all over again.
So maybe the enterprise's mobile security needs - especially remote wipe and lock - make device management all the more critical. It becomes critical not in terms of the ever increasing heterogeneous device environments found in enterprises, but rather for what a device management solution can do from a security perspective.
Hmmm....
