Originally posted by Doug Drinkwater, TabTimes

The increasing number of smartphones and tablets in the workplace will push 25% of enterprises to adopt their own app store by 2017, according to Gartner.

In a new study, the research firm says that enterprises will increasingly turn to these app stores to control the apps their employees are using, especially with the bring-your-own-app (BYOA) trend now deemed to be “as important” as bring-your-own-device (BYOD).

2012 was a pretty big year, in terms of mobile and enterprise mobility. Look at just a few of the milestones that spring to mind in a quick mental review of the year’s biggest mobile headlines:

Today’s workforce is increasingly empowered and enhanced with mobile technology. Colleges that are enabling their students to fully leverage mobile technology and learning are ultimately preparing them for success in today’s economy.

Consider some current trends:

At more and more organizations, mobility is driving the need for desktop virtualization. This is largely due to what Linda Tucci, senior news writer at TechTarget, describes as “the growing appetite for using smartphones and tablets to access desktops remotely—even if only in a pinch and only for limited use.”

In “CIOs Sell Enterprise Desktop Virtualization with Mobility,” Tucci quotes David Johnson, senior analyst at Forrester Research: “‘I can’t quantify it, but there is a link…Mobility is a tipping-point issue for desktop virtualization.’”

To control financial and human resources and reduce costs, most government agencies have standardization policies for desktop environments. Agencies routinely let their employees choose from a number of standard desktop hardware and software configurations.

In both the private and public sector, laptops, tablets and smartphones are well on their way to becoming indispensible productivity tools. As governments move toward the inevitable adoption of mobile end user devices, broadening existing standardization policies can bring many benefits to the mobile environment.

With more enterprises developing policies around mobile device usage, the role of the cloud is a hot topic. And why not? Any number of trends, issues and mandates suggest that its role will be significant—as in:

Despite the accessibility and cost-effectiveness cloud computing offers higher education, most colleges and universities have taken a conservative approach when it comes to actual investments in the cloud.

According to a survey of 496 campus IT leaders by the Campus Computing Project, more than two-thirds of colleges have outsourced student email to cloud providers. And yet, conversion rates for faculty email and other office applications are much lower. What’s more, deployment of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and learning management systems (LMS) to the cloud has not yet exceeded 5%.

Cloud computing has been a bright spot in a gloomy financial environment, with an increasing number of state and local governments adopting cloud infrastructures to cut IT costs and increase efficiencies. Simultaneously, agencies have seen significant increases in the amount of useful operations and tactical data they are collecting.

But just like chocolate and peanut butter, “Big Data” and the cloud are better together. These two IT trends are about to converge, a marriage that promises to permanently alter the way that agencies collaborate and share data.

Cloud computing is radically changing the way enterprises are doing business. Advantages include increased workforce productivity, simpler implementation of and growing support for telecommuting, reductions in labor force & infrastructure costs, and faster and cheaper integration of enterprise applications and storage solutions.

This infographic gives you an idea of just how big the cloud is becoming, how it is being used, the most popular telecommuting devices and ultimately why your enterprise should embrace cloud computing.

In previous posts we’ve written a lot about how Windows 8 will bring a new user interface to PC and mobile device users. But Windows 8 also introduces many features designed to help IT professionals better manage and protect their enterprise information. One of the more interesting tools IT industry watchers are talking about in this area is Windows To Go.

Part of the Windows 8 Enterprise edition (which we’ll discuss in greater detail later this month), Windows To Go will enable users to access their Windows 8 corporate image from a USB drive. IT administrators will have the power to burn whatever image they like on those USB drives, so they can determine the exact OS experience their users will have. Users can then boot that image from any x64 PC at any location, regardless of whether they are online. (Note: Windows To Go is not supported on Windows on ARM).

This is important to IT professionals because it gives them the ability to control the environment their users work in—from managing app and file access, to enforcing policy compliance and administering streamlined support. Windows To Go can further help IT professionals better secure and manage access to company information by employees using their own personal computers and mobile devices.