Where it’s app
Companies thinking of embarking on a mobility initiative will find themselves facing one important decision from the outset – whether to equip staff with a bespoke native app or whether to host an app in the cloud and purely facilitate remote access to it. According to Grace O’Rourke Veitch, Ireland country manager for Citrix, there are far more advantages to a remotely delivered application than a native one.
“You can look at mobility in a number of different ways but at its most simple, it’s really about giving access to applications and data no matter what device you’re using, whether it’s a mobile phone, a tablet, a PC or whatever and leveraging cloud whether it’s public or private,” she said.
“This is something that we’re being asked about on a daily basis – ‘how do I mobilise my business?’ Some companies start to look at this question at a tactical level, putting out a tender for devices and mobile device management (MDM), and some are looking at it from an XP-migration point of view.”
“All of these are mobility challenges,” she said.
In order to reap the benefits of cloud computing delivered to mobile users, first you need a fast and reliable mobile-first cloud platform. That could be a Google platform or it could be an Amazon platform or whatever, but either way that will enable the cloud for mobile users, Mark Van Der Linden, Google Ireland & UK
Citrix encourages companies to approach the issue of mobility from a strategic rather than a tactical point of view.
“What we’re saying is let’s turn it on its head and ask how you’re going to have an end to end solution in terms of how you deliver IT to mobile devices. If you do it that way, you’ll end up addressing a lot more issues in the process,” said O’Rourke Veitch.
“If you do it right, you’re going to address security concerns, you’re going to address all the multiple kinds of devices that are coming into your organisation, you’re going to be able to scale it out to public cloud as well as having your own private cloud and data concerns will be addressed because data won’t be stored on the devices.”
Approaching the matter like this also has an advantage, according to Citrix, of effectively future proofing a company from things like changes to operating systems or changing versions of applications.
“It also allows you to make the best use of BYOD not necessarily now but further down the road,” she said.
Starting advantage
Like many of the latest developments in IT, companies starting out from scratch have the advantage of being able to design their mobile architecture from the ground up. However most companies aren’t in a position to do that and so a compromise has to be found between making the best use of technology already purchased and seeking the advantages new technology offers.
“For some customers, thin clients make sense whereas for others mobile devices will make more sense. Either way, all companies are interested in sweating their existing assets as much as they can — they want to make the best use of the devices they already have,” said O’Rourke Veitch.
“But once you centralise and virtualise your infrastructure, then it really doesn’t matter what the end device is and often mobile devices cost a lot less to purchase and maintain than even thin clients do.”
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