Incorporating Mobility into your Technology Strategy

Sponsored by Dimension Data.

In Thinking about Robust Strategies for BYOD and Mobile, I wrote:

 A robust strategy for BYOD and mobility requires a re-thinking of the entire enterprise strategy. While re-thinking doesn’t equate to re-working, it does mean a complete end-to-end revisit of the enterprise strategy to ensure BYOD and mobile devices are well represented in everything from security to backup to accessibility.

I wanted to follow that up with a real-world example of a company that did exactly what I suggested.

A colleague of mine is the CIO of a mid-sized organization. A few years ago, she’d been struggling with how to incorporate BYOD into the organization’s technology and mobility strategy. Initially, she and her team were trying to ‘add’ BYOD into the enterprise by adding band-aid solutions to try to make BYOD work.

These band-aid solutions allowed devices to come into the enterprise and gave the appearance that things were working for the organization. Very quickly, the IT group realized their ‘band-aid’ solutions weren’t delivering anything more than a way to get user-owned devices onto the corporate network.

For example, these solutions didn’t provide a robust method for backup and recovery of user’s devices. A backup solution for BYOD (and all mobile devices) needs to provide not only backup and recovery but also security and retention for the data itself.

After about six months trying to address the shortcomings of their solution, the CIO decided it was time to take a step back and revisit their approach to BYOD and mobility. She decided to re-think their entire enterprise strategy from the ground-up, much like I suggested to introduce mobility as a key cornerstone to their business technology strategy.

Within six months, the CIO had a viable technology strategy in place in which mobility was a key feature of the enterprise strategy. Rather than an ‘add-on’ or band-aid solution to try to make mobility and BYOD work, they are now incorporating mobility into all aspects of their business solutions.

Has your organization incorporated mobility into your business and technology strategies? If so, how?

Sponsored by Dimension Data.