Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast projects 18-fold growth in global mobile internet data traffic from 2011 to 2016 – and predicts that mobile cloud traffic will account for 71% of total mobile data traffic by 2016. In a world where mobility is on the rise, enterprises are facing a rapidly evolving landscape, where more and more personal devices are coming into the workplace. Cisco’s Unified Workspace lets enterprises securely adapt to the increasing presence of personal devices, by offering a set of three Smart Solutions that integrate multiple personal devices securely and seamlessly to increase productivity and enhance collaboration.
The BYOD Smart Solution provides end-to-end BYOD lifecycle management and keeps productivity moving. In addition, it streamlines IT management by helping to secure data with unified policy.
With younger generations increasingly adept at technology, classrooms are adopting a tech-driven approach to teaching. Interestingly, what we see in response is the same as what we see in the workplace: a push toward BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device.
And as it turns out, students’ preferences for using their own devices over available library or computer lab resources carries over to their professional lives, as well. According to a recent Cisco study, “Two of five […] would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility, than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.”
In my recent guest post, Mobilizing the New Collaboration Experience in the BYOD Era, I discussed the increasing desire for untethered collaboration as users bring personal devices and applications into the workplace. IT departments must make the decision whether to be the “proactive enabler” and embrace BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies that allow for mobile devices or to be the “passive supporter” and limit users’ choices to one or two devices.
However, the challenges of supporting a global, mobile, remote workforce go beyond BYOD policies. It’s about enabling your employees, customers and other stakeholders to get business done in any location, on any device, and for any workload. A number of questions come to mind for me:
How can employees access information securely?
How do we enable better real-time knowledge sharing?
How do we do more with the same headcount?
How do we allow for maximum productivity anywhere, on any device?
Cisco announced today a study showing benefits, as well as complexities, relating to employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) to work. A colleague of mine forwarded this cartoon to me last week which I thought was quite amusing. It gave me all kinds of thoughts about my upcoming doctor’s visit.
Cisco is enabling BYOD by driving innovation through Unified Workspace, everything that makes workers efficient and productive moves along with them. Cisco is also offering three Smart Solutions, the BYOD, VXI and Remote Expert, all designed to help service provider and enterprises develop a scalable approach to their mobility initiatives while optimizing user experience and ensuring data security. Read More »
Last week during Interop Las Vegas, I was able to witness and participate in all sorts of conversations about virtualization, and its effect on the way we deploy, deliver and consume applications and services.
Virtualization itself is not a new topic, but given the way our environment has been shaping lately, it is becoming more and more relevant. In this new world we all carry multiple devices, we are always on the move, and the definition whether the app we are using is running from the cloud or from our devices is increasingly irrelevant.
Users do not care about the technology, or the role of virtualization or cloud, as long as they have access to the applications and data they need, whenever they need it. We sometimes think the users should care, but in reality, it is IT that should care, and not the users. And that is a big distinction.
This of course is not a surprise, but I perceived a sense of impatience and even annoyance from some of the users that I was able to question about this matter. I got a really clear message that whatever is the future of the desktop--or the workspace as more and more people refer to it, should be delivered to them soon.
As for the important characteristics of this workspace, from the users’ perspective:
Access to it has to be transparent. They must have an ‘on-demand’ connectivity environment that allows them to have secure access to the data and/or applications they need to complete the tasks at hand, without worrying about authenticating every time, on the device of their choice. Solutions such as Cisco AnyConnect and the Cisco Identity Services Engine provide these capabilities, and clearly there is pent up demand for such a solution deployed broadly across the enterprise.
