Mobile
Split Personality and The Mobility War!
IT vs. Consumers. Control vs. Freedom. Will work-life/personal-life separation technologies – whether “walled garden” or mobile virtualization platforms – yield significant Enterprise adoption?
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IT vs. Consumers. Control vs. Freedom. Will work-life/personal-life separation technologies – whether “walled garden” or mobile virtualization platforms – yield significant Enterprise adoption?
In the Gartner research report: “Four Architectural Approaches to Limit Business Risk on Consumer Smartphones and Tablets” (Publication Date: 15 December 2010), the authors – John Girard and Ken Dulaney – caution readers that users don’t like isolation methods that require or even give the impression of toggling between personal and business modes in their devices.
Can this be true? Wouldn’t IT and end-users warmly embrace a technology that allows IT to control the work partition which has access to corporate data and applications while the “personal” partition remains untouched? Users can do what they want here, while access to corporate data is limited or non-existent. Sounds win/win if you ask me.
In numerous organizations I have talked to, I found many have not yet implemented mobility/BYOD policies and therefore would not officially support any devices that were not company issued and controlled*. Furthermore, in certain organizations, there was a requirement to carry around two phones….a complete separation of work/personal data (this latter case was driven by sensitive and highly-valuable intellectual property stored on these smartphone devices). How is that for user experience? Overwhelmingly, workers want to carry one device for both their professional and personal business, rather than keeping a BlackBerry for work and an iPhone or Android for personal/home use.
In the end, while one data protection solution is unlikely to keep either camp happy, many of these users would gladly trade in their two-phone solution or company issued device for the flexibility and freedom to bring in whatever they wanted, even if that means having to toggle between a personal and a work partition.
* I recognize there is a lot of pressure to change, oftentimes such pressure coming from executive themselves, who want to walk around with the latest “eye candy”. Even President Obama sports an iPad under his arm these days…..
Ed. note: Trend Micro would like to know what you think about this. We enthusiastically invite your comments and we will read every one of them. For very detailed information:
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