The impact of BYO device policies on ‘big data’, and how to deal with it

The trend of employees bringing their own devices into the workplace will grow rapidly in 2012. This will create even larger stockpiles of data for IT to sift through and manage. Clive Gold*, EMC, reports on the impact of ‘the consumerisation of IT’ on big data - what he calls “the biggest opportunity of this decade” - and how organisations can best tackle it.

IT Transformation has become the buzzword in the industry recently, taking over from the nebulous ‘cloud’. 2012 may well become the year of transformation, and while many expected this wave of change to be led by large enterprises, the true transformation seems to have been happening in consumer IT. While enterprise IT has been under siege consolidating and managing with falling budgets, consumer IT has been on fire!

Consumer technology has transformed modern life; ubiquitous access, to everything, through a rich and simple user experience has become the norm. These users are now demanding the same experience at work and will refuse to continue in the old ‘desktop and documents’ paradigm. The acceleration in the decline of desktops will continue in 2012, in favour of mobile devices - namely tablets and smartphones more so than laptops or notebooks. In fact, IDC recently estimated that the smartphone market in Australia is nearly three times the size of the storage market. Furthermore, IDC’s research (IDC-Unisys ‘Consumerisation of IT Study: Closing the Consumerisation Gap’, July 2011) tells us that nearly 28% of Australian workers use iPhones for work, 25% use iPads and other tablets, and more than 20% use Twitter and Facebook at work.

What does this mean for the enterprise? Apart from the challenges of shrinking budgets and trying to do more with less, IDC research also shows that IT managers will have 10 times the number of servers to deal with, 50 times the amount of data, 75 times the number of files - and only one additional person to help them. IT managers now need to think differently; dramatic change is needed to survive. IT now needs to take a different approach, use ‘fresh eyes’ to look at the biggest opportunity of this decade - how to make all data available, to the right people, at the right time, no matter where they are, in order to make them more creative, innovative and/or productive.

At EMC, for instance, we developed and use the EMC Wire iPad app, which brings internal company information sources together including daily news, social media feeds and videos. This allows our employees to have access to all the internal information they need in one place, saving a great deal of time.

Think beyond the device

Organisations need to recognise that in order to fully exploit the lessons of recent IT consumerisation revolution, they need to think way beyond the device, and maintain their skills and experience in running enterprise IT.

To truly reap the benefits of greater mobility, organisations need business and technical experience to effectively converge, connect and control all the elements that exist in traditional and mobile environments. This in turn will enable them to serve customers, clients, employees and partners instantly and through their channel of preference, which is what the new connected world is all about.

So, since bringing your own technology to work is all about improving access, functionality, quality and performance, all while maintaining security, the next step for organisations is to bring in the experts in application transformation and life cycle management, to develop and migrate current software portfolios to modern frameworks while including data analytics and social media tools.

Manage the explosive growth in data

The accelerated use of consumer-style technology at work is also posing the challenge of creating huge mountains of data that isn’t being managed effectively in the absence of IT policies and processes to support it.

So where is all this data coming from? There were about 450 million internet users in 2009; by 2013, this is predicted to rise to over one billion. Use of social media applications in the Australian workplace varies from 20% of employees to nearly 44% of the workforce.

That is a lot of data. Besides, the very nature of this data is changing. It is largely unstructured data that replicates at phenomenal speeds. The key though is that while many IT managers may feel exasperated at the monumental task they face in simply taming the data deluge, data is in fact the driver, which leads to a number of interesting topics such as predictive analytics, collaborative innovation and even fraud detection.

At EMC, our view is that we’re transitioning to an information economy. Big data and analytics are central characters in this play. However, big data requires a different treatment and substantially more powerful technology to store, manage and manipulate than traditional architectures deliver.

It is crucial to devise business strategies to understand and interpret the data and define the resulting tangible business benefits and invest in the technologies needed to enable the collection, storing and analysis of the required data sets.

Big data analysis will enable the enterprise to trend, cross-reference and correlate disparate sets of structured, semistructured and unstructured data for competitive advantage. It’s the stuff that can potentially create wealth, avoid risks, improve our lives - maybe even cure cancer. For example, mortgage companies could reduce lending risk by overlaying house loan application data with foreclosure data in a geospatial context; retailers could aggregate social networking information, blog content and analyst research with sociodemographic data, to identify buying trends and motivations for customer loyalty; law enforcement organisations could apprehend many more suspects by evaluating CCTV video footage, photographic evidence, police records, social media comments and other information sources all together.

The potential gains from such analysis are significant, including faster routes to market, increased access to new customers, more insightful recruitment, improved marketing effectiveness and increased profitability.

Secure the device

The growth of employee-owned devices and the increasing use of social media applications in the workplace are creating new potential attack access ways, and the loss of employee devices (such as a mobile phone or laptop) is posing a big risk to company IP. What probably keeps IT support awake at night the most is the fear of lost mobile devices that contain company data.

An alarming 23% of Australians have admitted to having lost a device containing company information. Imagine what this translates to in terms of devices that are left in taxis, bars and hotel rooms. The potential consequences of losing company information in this way can be disastrous and organisations need to ensure they have control of the users and devices accessing their network.

Intelligent security management technologies are emerging that make ‘situational’ assessments and allow you to control access to data dependent on location, time of the day, etc to minimise the risk of data loss or theft. However, simple security measures such as applying a screen lock when the phone is powered on and setting up an inactivity time-out limit or auto-lock can also be useful should an employee lose the device.

There is a massive change in the way technology is transforming the enterprise. In the past, technology has been controlled and managed almost entirely by businesses. However, as users bring in their own devices and applications to the workplace, and demand greater access to information, everything seems to revolve around the users, their behaviours and needs. With the right strategy, enterprises can improve processes and IT infrastructure, cut costs and open up new revenue streams.

It is no longer feasible to dismiss or say no to end users. Consumer-driven technology is here to stay and the end-user expectation has changed forever, so now you need to embrace the change. The challenge for the enterprise is filling the gap between the flexibility and benefits introduced by these ‘mobile devices’ and enterprise management and governance. The agility, productivity and cost savings offered are crucial to the long-term survival of the enterprise.

*Clive Gold is the Marketing CTO of EMC Corporation, Australia and New Zealand, where he is responsible for EMC’s strategic product marketing activities and plays a critical role in advising on the overall direction of EMC. Gold has more than 25 years’ experience in the IT industry and has held a variety of senior positions in sales, marketing and services.