The proliferation of mobile devices has blurred the lines between personal and corporate devices in organisations.
To understand how organisations are dealing with this development, ITWeb, in partnership with Kaseya, today unveiled the Managing Mobile Connections Survey.
“How are companies approaching this? How are they dealing with the extra workload that these devices are creating? What policies and procedures are in place to ensure that organisations take advantage of the benefits that these devices offer their staff?” asks Garth Hayward, regional manager, Africa, at Kaseya.
Hayward urges businesses to view all endpoints as equal citizens in terms of access to corporate data.
Therefore, he explains, current policies governing the access of corporate networks and data, assuming they are robust enough, should be extended to include the management and control of access to the network for mobile devices.
“The challenge is that these devices, being mobile and not fixed at a location, need to have a platform that is able to manage and maintain them, regardless of where they reside at any one time,” says Hayward.
Regarding the infrastructure needed to handle these devices, Hayward says organisations are scrambling to include the 'bring your own device' phenomena into a concise management plan.
“However, [African businesses] haven't necessarily addressed how they plan to support the devices from a remote point of view. We are receiving a plethora of inquiries and trial requests from organisations to test our platform for Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices.”
Last year, ITWeb and Kaseya ran a similar Managing Mobile Connections Survey, which discovered that the majority of South African organisations do not have control over data flow between mobile devices and local data.
Hayward expects to see a change this time, as the advantages offered to an organisation's information access and distribution agility, as well as the cost reductions in delivering services and products to the local market as a result of the intelligence of these devices, is just too great to ignore.
“If one looks at the studies done over the past 15 years with telecommuting or home office workers, the productivity advantages have been proven over and over. Of course, sound policies and procedures need to be implemented. However, in a lot of cases, these are in place and they just need technology service platforms that are able to support their IT services strategy or SLA.”
Concluding, Hayward says lack of control over the flow of data would basically end in disaster.
To complete the survey, please click here.
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