The Benefits and Challenges of Mobility

I talked about the critical importance of turning the 70/30 rule on its head in my last post, that the winners in your competitive set are the ones who are able to spend less time, money, and human resources maintaining their current IT environment and more of their resources using IT to create a competitive advantage. Companies that use IT to help out-invent, out-innovate, and be more customer-focused than their competitors will find themselves top of mind and top of heart for their customers.
One of the areas that is gathering great momentum in the IT industry is mobility. More and more businesses are realizing the benefits of employees and customers being able to access their own information from any device and from anywhere.
There are many benefits to mobility that are influencing this trend:

• Portability: A number of recent studies point to the fact that extending access to critical work applications to all employees leads to greater employee satisfaction and a general sense of enablement and empowerment.
• Availability: The ability to access content from anywhere leads to improved productivity and efficiency. It also leads to much greater responsiveness. From a revenue perspective, opportunities for customers to buy at any hour from any device can be a game changer for many businesses. On more than one occasion, access to my Kindle account on those 3AM over-caffeinated nights has certainly been good news for any Amazon stock holder.
• Power Savings: While the momentum is building for the truly mobile workforce, initial estimates point to a potential for up to 44% power savings through virtualization and BYOD initiatives
• Personal Ownership of Devices: Can be a real difference maker for businesses leading to reduced costs, higher adoption, and better employee engagement/higher employee compliance.
• Employee Satisfaction/Retention: Flexibility to work when and where they choose is fast becoming a part of the overall compensation package for many workers. Multiple studies point to a significant number of younger workers considering flexible work locations and schedules, social media access, and ability to use their own devices being as critical in an overall compensation package as is pay.
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As with most things in life, there is a flip side. Along with the upsides of mobility, there comes a number of crucial challenges:

• Security
  • At the same time that employees and consumers are asking for easier, quicker access to their work applications and account information, high profile security breaches point out how sophisticated hackers have become at taking advantage of even the tiniest cracks in security.
• Performance
  • For most employees and customers, the only thing worse than not having access to applications and accounts is having access hampered by a poorly performing application.
• Cost Effectiveness
  • • Ensuring secure data access with multiple devices from multiple locations at all hours of the day (and night) introduces challenges. How do you create a secure, high-performing environment that doesn’t erode both the cost savings associated with employees and customers owning their own devices and the revenue opportunities of allowing customers to interact with you anytime they choose?

   

 Choosing the right partner
How can you dial in on just the right mix of access, security, and cost effectiveness? The answer is working with a partner that can bring to the table the right mix of products, design expertise, and experience. Zunesis is a partner that can work with you to build a solution that spans virtualization, security, server, storage, and networking capabilities. Allow us to work with you on a design that can deliver a high-performing, secure IT environment that cost-effectively provides all the benefits of mobility to your employees and customers. Make the call today, and see the difference that empowered employees and enthusiastic customers can make for you.

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