Ready or not, mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets are beginning to enter the work space and are here to stay. The demand for IT organizations to understand the implications of this trend and how to integrate it successfully into their internal operations and external offerings is critical.

What is Mobile Computing?

Today more and more people are conducting business on non-PC devices and their employers are actively adopting “bring your own device” programs. These non-PC devices include smartphones, tablets, PDAs, and other electronic gadgets that have the capability to access the Internet and much more. One simple example is how people use their smartphones to access work emails. Mobile computing has three basic components, including:

• Mobile hardware – Devices such as smartphones and tablets
•  Mobile software –Applications such as email or Facebook application on the smartphone
• Mobile communication – Network infrastructure and technologies

Benefits

Increased productivity – Imagine the productivity boost when you can conduct business wherever you are. Your desk is now mobile and all the business computing resources are available not only on your PC, but also on your smartphone or touch pad.

Improved collaboration – You can collaborate with your colleagues anywhere on any device that can access the Internet through work groups, either on social media or on your own business network.

Better customer service – Since more and more consumers are using their mobile devices to contact businesses, mobile computing capability allows a business to be nimble and responsive to their customers, using the same communication methods and platforms. 

Faster decision making – You can conduct business at the point of activity. The ability to collect, access and evaluate critical business information quickly and accurately means improved decision making that can have a far-reaching effect on your company's ability to compete successfully. 

Challenges for IT

Security Standards - According to Gartner, from 2010 to 2014, almost every enterprise mobile employee will have a smartphone that supports e-mail, Internet access and a variety of applications. As enterprises look to support even more complex mobile devices, a growing challenge will be to manage the security, the costs and the applications.

 When working mobile, one is dependent on public networks, requiring careful use of VPN. The integration of multiple devices with inconsistent security standards and use of social media on those devices, also pose a serious security threat to the business network and computing resources. The IT organizations are required to address data security issues and cyber attacks while enabling and supporting mobile devices on the fleet. 

Insufficient Bandwidth - Mobile Internet access is generally slower than direct cable connections. Those organizations that support mobile computing have to ensure sufficient network bandwidth so that the employees who work on their mobile devices can deliver to meet business standards. 

Before entering the mobile computing arena, each company and employee will have to evaluate how mobile computing fits into their goals and decide how they can improve productivity, while ensuring security of the critical information.

It seems that no matter where you look in IT, you cannot escape the phrase “deduplication” these days.   According to Gartner, 47% of the respondents to a survey conducted over the summer of 2011 ranked data growth in their top three challenges. With spending returning to more normal levels after a couple of down years because of the economy, 62% said they would plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centers by the end of 2011, while 30% would plan to build entirely new data centers.

Deduplication itself is becoming a critical “must have” for IT professionals, but it must be handled with care.  A bad strategy can quickly cause IT infrastructure costs to increase. With proper planning and implementation, a good deduplication strategy can:

• Greatly reduce cost while improving storage and backup performance
• Reduce backup windows
• Lower data center costs

There are two critical points to keep in mind when determining whether to implement a storage or backup solution that uses deduplication:

• Data that changes often is a bad candidate for deduplication
  Deduplication works by storing data one time.   When the data is changed, only the changed data is stored on disk.  If you attempt to use a deduplication solution with data that is constantly changing, you pay a premium for the deduplication software but lose out on the benefits since all of the changing data still has to be stored.
• Deduplication can consume a large amount of system resources
  There are many different options when it comes to deduplication processing.  It is important to keep CPU load in mind when determining which strategy to implement.   Whether you use your existing servers to deduplicate data or choose a dedicated appliance to handle the deduplication processing, the resource load needs to go somewhere and will require resources.