Enterprise smartphone and tablet incursion to grow in 2012

And now that the Kindle Fire has made Android tablets more popular, IT departments can only expect to see a wider array of new devices coming to work in the coming months. Forrester Innovation analyst Christian Kane says this wide variety of new devices is leading some companies to rethink how they manage mobility in the enterprise by managing access instead of devices.

What this means for users

What this means for users, says Kane, is that the company will let them bring any device they want to work nevertheless it won't take responsibility for repairing that device if it gets broken or replacing it if it gets lost. To put it more exactly, the job of the enterprise will be to provision access to certain applications that the user needs on their phone and to ensure that enterprise applications are effectively walled off from whatever other applications that users may download onto their own devices.

The second solution for companies looking to get a handle on mobile applications is to simply build their own mobile app stores that workers can use to get all approved applications for company use. This can ensure that companies can preapprove popular apps for users and in doing so know specifically what apps have access to their corporate network. And as Croft notes, companies will want to keep their workers using their own app stores by offering a wide array of popular games and non-work apps so that you create a "user-friendly environment to have apps that can be fun and not just business apps." That is, companies should expect to support Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on their company stores along with mission-critical productivity apps.

The bottom line

The bottom line, although, is that companies will continue facing major challenges with workers bringing their own devices to work and it's likely to remain a hot topic for IT departments heading into 2013 as so then. The good news, says Kane, is that companies are increasingly investing in the sorts of tools that will allow users to take more responsibility for managing their own devices, in this way freeing up IT departments to work on more valuable tasks that don't involve babysitting users who leave their iPhones in bars late at night.