Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 114

Managing Devices
The advance of personal computer and mobile technology means that most employees will
prefer their own personal computers, in the form of laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, for
office work rather than a company-issued device. And for the sake of data security and pro-
tection, there must be a way to manage and control these devices.
And as employees become increasingly mobile, the need to support the devices they use
to connect with work increases drastically. Because of the mobile trend, there is a greater
demand for remote access of confidential company data from mobile devices, opening
a whole new level of benefits and risk. When the bring your own device (BYOD) wave
started, it created nightmares for IT. New processes and software for mobile device man-
agement (MDM) and a new discipline called enterprise mobility management (EMM) were
created, but they all proved to be tedious and inelegant solutions that turned IT into baby-
sitters for devices simply because of the security risks they posed.
First, it important to understand what mobile device management and enterprise mobil-
ity management are.
Mobile Device Management MDM basically refers to software solutions that are aimed
at maintaining order amidst the chaos of device variety. It is often a clunky solution that
has IT developing or sourcing different software for different device platforms and operat-
ing systems. Either the same exact MDM software has to be ported to different mobile
platforms or different MDM software solutions already present for individual mobile plat-
forms have to be modified to work together. Without cloud applications, an enterprise must
resort to an installed MDM solution. As mentioned, this requires IT to babysit devices and
answer a lot of individual requests for device diagnosis and installation, not to mention all
the trouble it would cause when a device is stolen or lost. The potential damage to the orga-
nization would be tremendous.
Enterprise Mobility Management EMM is a relatively new field in IT management that
has been specifically created because of the wide use of mobile devices in the work environ-
ment. In short, because of the rapid increase of highly capable mobile devices, a business
need for mobile management arose. The scope of this discipline includes security, applica-
tion management, and financial management. This is a new discipline, so there are not so
many practitioners and even fewer business entities implementing it. That is not to say that
it is not a requirement; it is, especially if the organization has not yet embraced the cloud
but needs to support mobile users. But the fact remains that it adds unnecessary strain to
an organization's IT infrastructure and workforce simply to support employee convenience.
MDM falls under EMM, but EMM is not a solution for workforce mobility and device
management.
It is obvious by now that we are not advocates of MDM and EMM, and that is simply
because they are unnecessary in cloud computing. Cloud computing allows the offloading
of major computationally heavy processes from a connected device unto powerful serv-
ers optimized for such tasks; that is the nature of cloud applications. This is where it gets
interesting. With cloud computing, we can make little distinction between a tablet, a mere