Enterprise Mobility – Changing The Face Of It Sections

By Author: Jennifer Lewis
Total Articles: 304

The concept of enterprise mobility does not mean managing just one smart device but managing a plethora of smart devices and applications entering into the corporate arena and seeking permission to access data stored on the corporate servers. It also means managing and tackling the rapidly advancing technology that is trying to interfere in the corporate sphere in the form of mobile apps. Despite this, there is no doubt that the arrival of this concept has changed everything including the kind of apps and the way we were using those apps until now. The arrival of the enterprise mobility concept has changed the application's landscape from traditional apps such as SAP to cloud based delivery models such as sales force, Facebook, twitter and many others. Millions of new apps are being developed everyday to support a number of functions and operation of a business. Some of these apps grow to become extremely critical for business owners while some are lost in the darkness of the hundredth page of search results.
Therefore, it is becoming very important for IT sections to maximize the user experience. This is possible only by huge and non-stop availability of the applications and this demand could be met through cloud services only.

Along with the flexibility and agility of the new world of apps, there comes a totally new set of challenges for IT managers and business owners to confront. It has all become dynamic, at once as cloud computing services providing companies generally use SOA or Software Oriented Architecture and Virtualization. This makes it tough for them to identify apps and render appropriate services on a huge scale. It is estimated that 80 percent of the traffic on those data centres never comes out of them. The transfer of all those apps from private to public cloud is encapsulated within the "http" or "https" connection and this makes them invisible and therefore, out of reach and control of the smart phone users.

These challenges raise the need of a pervasive app visibility and control architecture using Deep Packet Inspection or DPI technologies. At present, a number of solutions are available in the markets that promise to offer visibility into the applications. These services include Network Performance Management and Application Performance Management. A worth mentioning factor with these solutions is that they can only offer visibility and have no hand whatsoever in providing control over the applications.

Next generation solutions such as enhanced firewall, WAN accelerators, application delivery controllers and Wi-Fi specific solutions have to rely on funnelling a large amount of traffic from across the network through a single-appliance (choke points). They do this to overcome scalability or cost related challenges that are often associated with the DPI in the enterprise IT infrastructure.

Another point is - what if these solutions are de-coupled from each other? Since there is no homogenous app classification between all the available tools, end-to-end management stays a dream for a good number of IT heads. Moreover, the fragmented nature of using individual point products does not give a unified network management view of the entire network making it extremely difficult to keep the entire network under management. This in turn, makes it impossible to provide a superior user experience for application delivery for the virtualized private cloud data centres to public cloud services and to the end users from within that single management system.

The author is an expert app developer with a Dallas, Texas based app development company. He specializes both in android app development and in iPhone app development.