It’s great to read solid research like this about your industry when you’ve been banging your head against the walls of corporations for over a year attempting to convince them to remove their collective heads from the sand and get serious about their mobile devices. Many CIOs, CEOs and assorted IT (in both government and private business) folk are either unaware or don’t impart a great deal of importance to the danger mobile devices pose as data-rich endpoints ripe for malicious harvesting of data.
This research seems to suggest what we’ve been sensing thus far at TechOrchard as we’re out in the field researching, interviewing and selling. It’s getting progressively easier to break through that initial veil and get right down to helping companies build strategy and systems to integrate their mobile devices into their existing IT infrastructure.
From the article:
“Specifically in the next five years 65% of corporations will adopt MDM to address security concerns from smartphones and tablets.”
I actually think it will be a bit lower than the Gartner survey suggests — the adoption rate will likely be held down by non-security related factors (read: internal bureaucracy and CEOs who haven’t yet had to get in front of a legal inquisition or pay through the nose for PR and liabilities).
Also from the report:
“The driving reasons behind that trend are obvious: Gartner predicts that through 2017, 90% of enterprises will have two or more mobile operating systems to support. In the past year, many companies have moved to Apple as their main mobile device platform, with others to follow over the next 12 to 18 months. As other operating systems like Windows 8 mobile platforms grow, MDM will need to be adopted” Gartner said.
That’s kind of like saying, “Next year, we will have men and women working here,” but it’s certainly true from what I see in the marketplace every day, and it is a broader and more difficult to control issue already than the report seems to suggest. Most IT folk and CIOs are clueless when it comes to the vulnerabilities that exist to their IP and data as a result of crap security protocol on employee (BYOD or otherwise) devices.
We’re busy enough as it is these days, but 2013 is sure to be a bumper year from mobile device management MSPs for those who are familiar with the marketplace and how to navigate it.
