Subscribe

From legacy to mobile

By Charmaine Shangase
Johannesburg, 26 Aug 2016

ITWeb Events Calendar

Look out for ITWeb events and ensure you book your seat to any one of our relevant, well-timed occasions that address a real business need. For sponsorship opportunities, contact Debbie Visser and position yourself as a leader to decision-makers.

"I would ask if infrastructure legacy is a valid excuse for not going mobile?" This was the question posed by Niel Malan, head of cloud solutions at Jurumani Solutions, at the recent ITWeb Enterprise Mobility Summit 2016.

"Definitely not! Most large organisations sit with vast legacy deployments, and doing a complete rip and replace is practically impossible," he continued.

According to Malan, these environments can still transform themselves by building a mobile strategy where mobile capable infrastructure is deployed in parallel with a translation layer between legacy and mobile, which focuses on making the two or three most critical applications available as a start. "This mobile infrastructure layer can start small and grow over time as users and applications increase. There would also have to be a parallel digital transformation strategy which focuses modernising the legacy applications to bring them directly onto the mobile capable layer, which would also offer additional business benefits," added Malan.

In Jurumani's experience with its customers, three things that stand out as hindrances for organisations going mobile are:

* Business Complexity: Organisations need to adapt to the increase in mobile devices in terms of network infrastructure capacity, management capabilities, applications as well as business policies and procedures. "Unfortunately these changes require going against the trend of declining IT budgets. Internationally studies have found that embracing mobility opens up productivity increases from 18% - 30%. While these benefits far outweigh the associated cost, many organisations still find it difficult to appropriately consider these benefits when building the business case for going mobile. Mobility business cases that focus on long-term business benefits as opposed to immediate saving on average show a 150% return on investment," explained Malan.

* Security and Risk: Security is raised as the biggest concern by almost two thirds of companies. While this is a completely valid concern, it is a concern that can be addressed by investing in a mobility program that directly deals with the security challenges specific to their industry. "Organisations should also promote apps within the company instead of leaving app discovery to the individual employees," he advised.

* Legacy Systems: Another large stumbling block is the prevalence of legacy systems within organisations that are not accessible to or compatible with mobile devices. "Think of those black-and-white terminal interfaces you still see at many banks, pharmacies and travel agencies today. These organisations will require deliberate investment in digital transformation if they want to embrace mobile, which at the same time opens up multiple new and more productive channels for their employee and customers to interact with the organisation," he said.

When talking about the benefits of cloud in enterprise mobility, he said the cloud is a tremendous tool organisations can use to increase their own agility while also reducing underlying cost of certain aspects of their IT spend. "In terms of mobility infrastructure and management, cloud networking allows organisations to deploy large-scale mobility-focused networks cheaper and ten times faster than with the traditional approach," he elaborated.

"Most generically, the concept of cloud speaks to a model where an application, service or set of infrastructure is purchased on a utility basis from a provider who specialises in offering only that application, service or infrastructure to thousands of customers. The provider in each case runs a highly specialised and optimised operation, which gives them massive economies of scale and world-class skills from which the customer also benefits. These benefits become even more pronounced when you consider the pace at which the mobile world is evolving, allowing organisations to stay agile and competitive even in a skills scarce economy like Africa," he concluded.

Malan's organisation, Jurumani Solutions, was one of the sponsors of the ITWeb Enterprise Mobility Summit.

Share