What is Enterprise Mobility Platform As A Service And Why It Will Win
This year enterprises are at a very pivotal crossroads when it comes to how their Line of Business (LOB) applications are architected, developed, deployed and managed. Why are they at this crossroads? Why can't they just keep plodding along the same way they always have?
The world around the enterprise environment has changed with the introduction of the iPad and its consumer success. Last summer we started getting introduced to a reimagined Windows environment that has been engineered to be a touch first, tablet friendly OS. Its seems that every week I read or hear about companies giving employees iPads or planning a large scale adoption of tablets as a primary business tool.
With the rapid uptake of mobile devices in the consumer market enterprises are becoming more and more consumerized, meaning employees are not only bringing in their iPads they want to use them to get their job done. The problem is multi-fold and up to this point solutions have been executed very poorly. The proof can be see across businesses all around the world, there are very few who have actually leveraged modern mobile platforms to do much beyond e-mail, texting and phone calls. Sure some have started getting their toes wet, creating some native apps or even mobile friendly web clients, but not many have adopted a full fledged strategy to provide enterprise mobility to their workforce.
This morning I was reading articles about enterprise mobility and caught up on Ken Hess' ZD Net column, BYOD. In an article where he postulates how Apple can take over the enterprise he makes a profound statement about the change that is upon enterprises:
“BYOD will usher in another Enterprise shift: The shift toward a data-centered Enterprise. No longer will companies have to worry about desktop hardware. Your company will provide services, such as remote/virtual desktops, storage, client Apps where appropriate and access. It will be up to you how you connect in to do your work. That’s a tremendous burden off of company shoulders.
The company’s burden is to provide you with a pathway in and services with which to work. The only difference in then and now is that you’ll own the computer. For the most part, no changes will have to be made to your device.
Done correctly, the scenario is very simple.”
All of this can only mean that corporations have to have a solution to meet this growing demand for new touch interfaces and in particular mobility and tablets. This solution can't be limited to company issued hardware, but be flexible enough to account for employees personal choices and the constant flux of employees in and out of the company taking their personal hardware with them. Enterprises are also facing the problem that existing business client software is designed to work well with classic desktop systems behind a firewall, on their company issued hardware. Typically this means a web application that in many cases was not really architected for modern web browsers (IE 6 still lives), let alone for mobile-touch client devices like a smart phone or tablet.
That was 'good enough' a few years ago, but a lot has changed. Traditionally a company would supply employees with a company issued mobile phone and typically foot the bill with the carrier. Blackberries have been the dominant platform, but that is obviously crumbling. RIM, the company that owns Blackberry, has not only suffered from service outages, but also a lack of keeping up with the current consumer demand. Recently they announced they would expand there enterprise mobile management platform to support Androids and iOS devices. But this still relies on what has become an outdated infrastructure where devices are provisioned and controlled by a company's IT department.
Tools like RIMs Blackberry Enterprise Solution provide a popular model where the corporation images mobile phones for employees. This creates a new image the IT department can have confidence they can support. The model is the natural extension where the company controls the images installed on their PCs. While I can appreciate why the corporate IT department likes this model, I have always found issue with it as I and I can only assume most others feel a personal ownership mentality of the machines I work with everyday. I want the freedom to install the tools I need to do my job efficiently.
Other attempts at solving these problems are only slight variations of this old school way of thinking. Apple allows companies to sign up for their enterprise program. This gives companies the ability to control their employee's devices by dictating what features can and can't be used by controlling configurations. Android is open, but often a company needs to stand up and administer their own Android marketplace.
The problems corporate IT departments have to solve to enable a mobile success include authentication, device and application provisioning and data access. In other words how to employees login to a corporate network yet retain the freedom they expect with their personal hardware. Then how does a company control what devices are actually allowed to connect to their network? The final two are related, once authenticated what applications and what data does that person have access too?
While social sign-in has caught on in the consumer market corporations rely on a federated identity such as Active Directory for authentication. This presents challenges that up to this point have not really been solved. In the past we have used virtual private networks (VPN) to solve this issue. That requires a lot of work and frustration for a typical end user, thus increasing overall support costs.
Next came RSA keys, which make things much easier for end users and continued to reduce support costs. But what can corporate IT departments learn from the social sign-in experience and modern claims based identity models? This is what cloud services like Windows Azure ACS, Ping Identity and others have begun to offer. But many of these services are still somewhat cumbersome to implement. The intricacies of these technologies is still well above the level of typical developers. Solving those barriers will open the gates to the next wave of corporate authentication implementations that should reduce the friction that exists today.
As the corporate workplace becomes more consumerized this natural desire will only increase. Employees want the freedom to take ownership of the hardware. iPads start at $500, an extremely cheap price point for companies. At this pricing level they can afford to essentially give their employees iPads to keep! This sort of impact cannot be ignored.
So corporations must figure out a new way to manage device access. Device management means being able activate and deactivate the ability for a device to access the corporate network. I configure my home router to only allow devices with an approved MAC address, which is a similar technique. The reason this is important is employees loose devices, change devices and of course leave the comfy all together. Controlling if a device can access a network is important. Again changing the way this is managed also has to change.
Authorization concerns are also important, but in many ways this is a component of application architecture. But still a strong authorization strategy that leverages modern cloud based infrastructures will enable enterprises to build the new generation of mobile touch first applications.
As we enter the next generation of enterprise line of business application architecture we have to decide how we are going to leverage the cloud, tablets and smart phones with the desire of employees to use their personal consumer devices. Modern application architecture must provide a certain level of enjoyment employees have when playing games and using other mobile first applications. Corporate IT departments must create a new infrastructure that make managing the security and support around these new line of business applications easy and cost effective.
The promises the cloud is offering will help the back-end support much easier. The power and cross platform flexibility HTML5 provides makes creating more engaging user experiences easier, while still providing a reduced set of development and support complexities. Over the next few weeks I plan on diving deeper into these topics and explore how existing and legacy system are not suited for the future as well as how to execute a modern line of business mobile solution.