The Agony and the Ecstasy of Mobilizing Applications

What plans do organizations have for mobilizing enterprise applications? Big ones, undoubtedly. But as enterprises move ahead, what are the greatest struggles and costs that they face?

IDG Research Services recently took a quick poll of more than 100 IT folks to try to find out. Bottom line, there appear to be very high hopes to mobilize lots and lots of apps over the next year. The barriers? Well, the top ones appear to be having to develop for multiple mobile operating systems and – no surprise – our old foe security.

The respondents IDG polled predict that nearly 40% of all enterprise applications will be mobilized within the next 12 months. Impressive. And yet...

Most said that all the primary mobile OS platforms need to be supported – Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Phone – what with the BYOD trend and all. That’s challenging enough, not to mention costly enough, not to mention that user experiences often differ slightly from device to device. That can be frustrating, because it’s up to IT to ensure that employees’ app experiences are of high quality on whatever device they are using.

And as I indicated, the majority of respondents are not highly confident in the security of their enterprise mobile apps today. More than 60% (6-0) said they weren’t confident at all or only somewhat confident in the security of mobile enterprise apps today. By contrast, just 6% said they were extremely confident.

How can they get more confident?

Well, there are many, many pieces of security technologies and products that I could go into in agonizing detail. But at a higher level, the security problem with mobility flows organization-wide. Across the enterprise, everyone needs to be involved from the moment of the mobile app’s conception to its implementation and its ultimate use. That means not only IT administrators, but designers, software architects, company management and end-user employees themselves all share accountability. Try to make mobile security a top priority every step of the way, rather than rushing to react when something bad happens.