The Next Phase in Mobility

Transcript

Introduction

Evan Shuman: Welcome today to the next installment in the Cisco Technology Audio Series. I'm Evan Shuman.

Wireless communications, with all of its flexibility and security risks, have permeated the U.S. culture in the last few years like nothing else since the Web. More recently, mobile advances have added multimedia functionality into consumer cell phones, pushing this mobile envelope yet further.

To make sense of this all, we have with us today Ellen Daley, Vice President for Enterprise Mobility for Forrester Research. Ellen, thank you very much for giving us some time today.

Interview

Ellen Daley: Great. Glad to be here.

Evan Shuman: When Cisco first commissioned your services for this effort, you were writing about the many different ways people are using mobile. Where do you see all of this mobile technology going with the consumer push? What impact a couple years down the road do you see this having on the typical enterprise?

Ellen Daley: Mobility is everywhere today. We can't open up our doors without carrying our wallet and our mobile phone, and that mobility in consumers' lives and in our day-to-day lives is not just something that is going to stay in our consumer lives, right? Our familiarity and our ability to just call anyone no matter where we are, obviously, we're using that already in our work lives, and enterprises recognize that or are even paying for those cell phone bills.

But there are more types of functions that are happening in the consumer world, like multimedia capabilities and use of more applications leveraging mobile data versus just mobile voice. So what we see is these consumer wireless and mobile technologies really creeping and seeping their way into the enterprise. Forrester calls this concept "technology populism," how consumer technologies, no matter what they are but predominantly in the kind of mobile device and wireless space, are really creating a groundswell in the enterprise, where it's power to the employee. The employee says, "I need to use my iPhone," or, "I need to use my Sidekick because I'm so used to it in my personal life. I now need to use it in my professional life." And it's creating massive, massive unrest and concern in the IT manager's head.

Evan Shuman: Isn't there a legal issue if you are a corporation and you permit or even, dare I say, encourage employees to use their personal devices?

Ellen Daley: So what we're talking about here is really the use of people's personal devices -- like I said, the iPhone, the Sidekick, the Motorola Cube, the Blackberry -- in the corporation. And what that typically means is getting wireless e-mail or connecting to the corporate network, getting corporate data out onto that mobile device.

Now, what this does is besides create a lot of convenience for the end-user employee, and it's certainly a nightmare for the IT manager, it does create risk, right? And that risk is for the IT manager but also for the corporation at large because all that data that is very special to the corporation, customer data, financial data, now has the risk of really trotting out the doors on a little device. So that risk is there present and needs to be managed and mitigated very significantly.

Furthermore, in some industries, like in healthcare for HIPAA, patient confidentiality information must be really handled with kid gloves from a regulatory perspective. In retail, PCI rules are requiring a much more careful control of consumer credit card information. And Sarbanes-Oxley is making everything have to be audited and tracked in a much more concerted fashion. So, yeah, there are real risks and, in some cases, real regulatory risks, as well, of all these devices coming in, being used over multiple types of networks and lots of different applications on those devices and networks.

Evan Shuman: How do you deal with some of the data security issues that you touched on? How do you prevent that information from leaving your doors at the end of the day?

Ellen Daley: You can't just think of this as an isolated problem. You can't think of, "I just need to protect the data on the device." You really have to look at the mobility issue within an enterprise pretty holistically. That means looking it across from a devices perspective. What are all the multitude of devices that you're going to need to have to manage and control, even if you don't want to do it because your employees are going to demand it?

What is the set of networks that you have to manage security over and then also that those devices will connect to? And that could be wireless LAN, WiFi, WiMAX, or even private networks, even 900-megahertz networks, and increasingly, ZigBee and RFID network. How do you manage and control those?

And then the third area is the software. How is it that you manage and control the long litany of applications that are going to be put over these networks on those multitude of devices, and then how do you consistently manage -- and consistently is an important word here -- the management of those networks, devices, and applications and also secure them?

They kind of want an answer, right? They want one way to manage, in particular, all their devices to make sure that they're mitigating the risks that we spoke about earlier. And a way to do this is to really start thinking of enterprise mobility for your firm, right, in a holistic manner across devices -- all the different types of devices, all the different types of networks, all the different types of applications, and think of consistency and security in management policy.

Evan Shuman: How do you deal with some of those regulatory issues that would tend to -- currently to frown on allowing employees to use their own devices?

Ellen Daley: So there are complicated issues, and where this really comes up is, at least from what we see at Forrester, is less from a regulatory perspective and more from just a very [inaudible] perspective. So today, the majority of firms either pay for devices and/or pay for service, whether that's voice or data service, for some subset of their employees, not all their employees. And usually there's very extensive policies that firms will write up to say who gets their phone paid for, who gets their data plan paid for, who gets a Blackberry paid for, for example. What are the rules around that usually has to do with level or frequency of mobility. The issue here for the firm is really to make sure that they're being fair in the distribution and payment of mobile devices and services, whether they're buying them or just letting an individual bring it into the corporation.

And I think we're going to expect over the next few years a lot more policy changes, attempts to understand around split liability, billing, all the [inaudible] -- around for voice and for data, who buys -- who buys the device. All these types of issues are -- continue to be sorted out, but usually, it's a policy that has to drive this because you can't buy a phone or pay for a phone or data plans for everyone.

Evan Shuman: Now, that makes a lot of sense. Good words to think about when you're looking at how you're going to handle mobile. Ellen, I want to thank you very much for giving us your thoughts today.

Ellen Daley: Great. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Evan Shuman: For the Cisco Podcast Series, this is Evan Shuman. For more podcasts on technology and other global news information, please go to newsroom.cisco.com. That's newsroom.cisco.com.