The rise in mobility has raised challenges around connectivity, security, visibility, and productivity.It places significant pressure on CIOs to keep pace with a new digital transformational age and changing end-user habits.

The CIO as catalyst for transformation

Our recent Mobile Workforce Report (MWR) indicated that more than half of its respondents saw a return on investment from mobility-related initiatives.It’s hardly surprising in light of

mega trends such as social media, mobility, analytics, and cloud.

Create workspaces for tomorrow by embracing mobility and smart-working solutions

End-users want to be able to access applications to complete work tasks and be productive, in and outside of the traditional office space. The CIO’s focus must be on ensuring the right levels of security are being afforded to mobile enterprise applications without putting the network at risk.

Security throughThe network lens

The challenge is that there’s no longer control over traditional IT, because the edge of the network has moved. Business applications may, or may not, reside in an on-premise data centre, or alternatively in a private or public cloud, or a hybrid thereof.

Granting the employee ubiquitous access to the corporate network

The biggest change is the role of the network in security, as it relates to mobility. Fewer firewalls and perimeter devices will be deployed in a data centre, because the network has increasingly become the security endpoint.

Wireless and wired access – the 80/20 rule

While traditional IT can enable access for a computer or device working from a standard operating system, the explosion of IoT will drive a significant amount of growth in technology, or even non-technology, that needs to be IT enabled.

The Internet of complexity

This introduces another stumbling block for CIOs: the lack of interoperability and integration between business systems and the data centre. Programming interfaces need to allow for the proliferation of new devices, while being simple enough not to complicate their use.

The Internet of complexity continued

Going forward, CIOs will need to focus on how users will connect to an application, as well as the best use of that application. It means a shift from the typical manual user-based intervention to policy-based abstraction — so the focus will be more on people, policies, and the platform.

People, policy, and platform

As the end-user wants access to more in terms of applications, connectivity becomes more and more prevalent. Those organisations that offer flexible work experiences, and improved access control to the information, are transforming the fastest.

It’s not about the end-user; it’s about what the end-user needs

The network, often seen as a laggard in the transformational journey, now has to be able to provide business with significant speed, agility and, of course, security.

Picking up the pace

It’s exciting to see the pace change in networking as a technology after years of stagnation. The evolution is allowing CIOs to facilitate mobility and end-user computing in a way that’s not restrictive to the mobile worker. By making the network a security endpoint, it’s allowing more flexibility in rolling out applications and services.

Concluding thoughts