The migration of enterprise CRM, ERP and BI applications and cloud based services to mobile smart connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones is driving an industry that a recent Markets & Markets report believes was worth $67.21 B in 2011 and will grow to $ 181 B by 2017.
As part of this migration an industry has grown up around mobile device and application management (MDM and MAM) to support CIO’s and IT support groups with the management of owned devices and application availability on bring your own device (BYOD), with a total estimated user base of 2.4 Billion enterprise smart phones by 2017 and 97 Million tablets (Abi and Infinite Research).
Some examples of how policy on these smart connected devices can help are:-
- Priority – As real time services such as unified communications (UC) and IP conferencing start to be mixed with information and data services on the smart connected device, the management of SLA’s and prioritisation of real time voice and video drives the need for policy controls to assure user experience.
- Personal vs Professional – Additionally with BYOD the ability for different user traffic to be directed to different networks e.g. my facebook uses my mobile network data plan, but enterprise UC defaults to using corporate WiFi when in the office. Also potentially the ability for service providers to create alternative private and professional data plans, with different traffic being sent to different networks (APN’s)
- Bill shock controls – Also location and time of day aware usage policies may be applied, e.g. turn off data roaming when not connected to the preferred operator and always opt for a roaming WiFi partner, this can even be on a per country basis.
- Performance monitoring – The reporting of actual application and network performance can enable the monitoring of SLA’s and where appropriate the service provider can act to improve network performance as seen by the device.
- VPN aware – And being on the device enables these service controls before traffic enters the VPN tunnel, enabling traffic classification and prioritization but still fully secured.
These are ways in which service providers can make themselves relevant to the enterprise and help with the mobile enterprise explosion.
