Citrix Application Performance Management
Citrix Identifies the Complexity of Personal Apps in the Workplace
January 15, 2013
By Rory Lidstone, TMCnet Contributing Writer
The challenges associated with BYOD are typically on the hardware side. Indeed, the challenge of incorporating many disparate devices with different mobile operating systems is great, but integrating mobile apps on employees' personal devices onto a corporate network is quite the challenge as well.
Two major factors have led to this being an issue, as identified by Citrix county manager for South Africa Sean Wainer: a rise in the number of business apps available on alternative platforms, namely Android (News - Alert) and iOS, over the last year and employees being accustomed to downloading apps on their personal devices then using them at work.
Wainer went on to add that this leads to growing pressure on the IT department to "monitor the complexity of all these proprietary platforms to ensure the business still has some measure of control, or risk complexity, confusion and opening their network to the threat of malicious attack."
Indeed, according to a report commissioned by Citrix, 43 percent of organizations called managing applications on mobile devices "difficult" after the introduction of a BYOD policy. Citrix predicts that BYOD will force IT departments to focus on the challenge of apps and data governance more going forward.
This year specifically will see this situation come to a head with many enterprises having to deal with a large number of different form factors, resulting in a "continued surge" of staff downloading personal apps for business purposes. With this growing complexity, IT departments won't be able to deploy one solution of set of solutions to handle the situation.
While this may not seem worth it, an International Data study states that 65 percent of organizations that implement a BYOD policy report greater productivity.
The complexity of handling mobile devices is not limited to the enterprise, however, as the fourth quarter 2012 ByteMobile Mobile Analytics Report, published by Citrix, demonstrates. This report identifies differing mobile usage patterns across mobile operating systems, with Android devices largely used for media playback and Internet browsing, which together make up 70 percent of mobile data volume on the platform. Meanwhile, 75 percent of data volume for the iPhone (News - Alert) is made up of media playback, iTunes and browsing.
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