Computing Canada – Last Year, We All Talked About A BYOD Problem… Our Biggest Mobile Problems Are Now Under Control
In Brian Bloom’s recent article, he discusses how last year, we all talked about a BYOD problem. However he now acknowledges that our biggest mobile problems are now under control. But as all the excitement, panic and hand-wringing starts to die down, the conversation turns to finding the right solution.
Another Canadian company, Igloo Software Inc., is putting all its chips on the cloud as a way to separate personal and business applications – or combine them if necessary. It proves cloud – based “communities” for businesses, on which software can be shared and accessed through any Web browser, including on smart phones and tablets.
For security purposes, IT can limit access to these private networks to certain IP addresses. The company is also working on software called WebDav, currently in beta, which will allow workers to mount their “community” as a network drive.
“The beauty of cloud is that it’s a capability that offers a number of advantages over on-prem,” says Andrew Dixon, Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Igloo. “One of them is you can turn it on very quickly.”
The overriding concern about BYOD, and thus, the need to manage devices in the enterprise, is still security. Smith comes back to the initial problem: the tug of war between IT, which wants control, “and what users what to do, which is pretty much anything without any controls.”
“These two opposing forces bang into each other in the middle. Every once in a while you get an earthquake. And the earthquake is a data breach.”
The consumerization of IT may be inevitable, but now that our greatest fear – these major seismic events – can be assuaged in numerous ways, maybe we can relax a little and look instead to what benefits a mobile workplace will bring.