The greatest worry about Bring your own device (BYOD) strategy is security. With larger cloud service providers and hardware device manufacturers giving a serious thought to acquiring and consolidating mobile device management services, the problem of security may get resolved in unexpected ways. However, for the present and perhaps for all time, cloud users are advised to focus on data protection and security management and leave mobile device management technologies and integration efforts to the professionals and cloud technology developers.
Traditional data management services assume that data resides on the devices from which it is accessed. With the advent of the cloud, data no longer resides on devices, but in the cloud. The device is merely the access gateway and not the storage repository. Users no longer need to store the information for ease of access or email it to themselves for their use. The data can be accessed from anywhere, anytime and form any device with a simple browser based application and an Internet connection. As a result, administrators need to focus their attention on the institution of data and user governance policies and implementation of these policies enterprise wide, rather than on the technologies that make it possible for them to manage mobile devices connecting to the enterprise network.
Collaborators operating on the same network are freed from the burden of providing their team with the latest versions of the documents. All versions of the document are stored in the enterprise cloud and are available to them at all times. The documents can be accessed and viewed by multiple users and even modified collaboratively, using sophisticated tools that are made available with the cloud software. None of the users need to grapple with technicalities of file sharing protocols or file synchronisation, etc. These activities are abstracted to the cloud software, and the end users are left free to work with the files in real time over the Internet.
The key to effective mobile device management lies in acceptance of the changed reality. Enterprises, launching into mobile device management technologies must begin their journey with a complete understanding that they are creating a new paradigm in technology management. They must get ready to abstract almost all technology related managerial tasks to the cloud service provider while retaining the core of their business data management with themselves. They should focus on the task of setting up a policy driven user management system, creating security awareness among their employees, and instituting policies for monitoring and reporting on the quality of cloud services they receive.
