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).

A friend of mine was responsible for creating the BYOD pilot program for a Fortune 10, $50B healthcare company. In the process he learned several important and surprising lessons, which he has kindly passed along in blog form.

One lesson he learned is that the biggest cost in developing a large corporate BYOD policy rollout may not be directly related to technology or devices at all. In many cases, it’s the tab for lawyers and HR staffers to review proposed policies, and to develop the lengthy contracts employees ultimately need to sign to use their personal devices on the corporate network.

Windows 8 is finally out. The question for enterprise is, should we care? While I don’t see any enterprise professionals doing cartwheels over it, the early returns do look somewhat promising – at least for portable devices.

I myself laid eyes on a bevy of news Windows 8 devices at a hardware vendor’s coming out party a few weeks ago, and I liked what I saw. However, there was a distinct consumer flavor to these offerings (as one might expect from the company that pioneered personal electronics back in the 1970s).

But some more robust Windows 8 devices are also on tap, and I have to think they could have some serious allure in the corporate sector. To date, while many enterprise organizations have come to tolerate the tablet, I think the number of large enterprise companies that actively embraced – or God forbid, actually pushed tablets out to users proactively – you could count on your digits, without removing your shoes. I believe that most tablets in the enterprise initially came in the back door, or in many cases, through the boardroom door as executives showed up to work with their shiny new devices and demanded that IT hook them up to the corporate network.

I get to talk to a lot of CIOs in my line, and I always enjoy getting their perspective on technology and change. I’m frequently awed by their intelligence and the sheer scope of their knowledge and experience. I’ve often been surprised by their backgrounds, as well. I can think of top CIOs who came out of college with degrees in Philosophy, Chemistry, even Zoology. None of them thought they’d end up running IT for a major agency or corporation. (Guess which one ran an entire State’s IT? See the answer below.*)

So it’s particularly interesting to talk to them now, as the world they grew up and carved out a career in begins to disintegrate around them. Some people are even questioning if there will be such a thing as a CIO role 10 years from now. The question isn’t that far-fetched: “Self service” IT is a reality now, with a complete range of custom IT resources readily available to any department or individual who decides to “go rogue,” while bring-your-own device (BYOD) is spreading through organizations like wildfire – regardless of IT’s official policy on the practice, one way or the other.

In my conversations with CIOs and IT leaders during the past 18 months, most consider it a given that they must have a mobile strategy for their organizations. These strategies range from allowing employees to access the corporate network with their personal devices (a practice widely known as Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD for short), to pursuing a full scale switchover to a tablet-based infrastructure for users. Most companies find themselves somewhere in the middle.

The one fly in the mobility ointment for the majority of IT leaders is the issue of data security. Simply put, mobility breaks the time-tested perimeter security model that most organizations are still desperately clinging to. The fact is, the perimeter model is already broken. Mobility just brings this issue out into the light.

Originally Posted by Lane Jesseph, Tablets at Work Blog

When modern workers move from smartphone to desk phone to IM to email to conferencing—and from desktop to laptop to tablet and back to smartphone again—the conversation can get a bit muddled. But since each medium offers unique capabilities and strengths, none is likely to disappear in the short term. And the BYOD trend—whether contained, discouraged, or cultivated in your organization—surely adds more complexity.

That’s why more enterprises are pursuing unified communication strategies and solutions—ones that can help today’s mobile workers take advantage of all the communication tools available so conversations are enhanced, not fragmented.

Microsoft Lync is one such solution drawing increasing attention from enterprises determined to leverage diverse communication types, not restrict them. Why is this relevant now?

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:

The use of mobile devices on public sector networks is top of mind for most government agency and IT leaders. You can be sure that some form of mobile endpoint device is coming soon to the public sector—in spite of the security risks that keep agency IT leaders awake at night.

Don’t let security challenges derail your mobility plans, says U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel, who warns IT leaders against making a “false choice between security and innovation.”

Indeed, federal mobility initiatives such as VanRoekel’s federal mobility strategy, General Services Administration’s (GSA) strategic sourcing plan for mobility initiatives and National Institute for Standards and Technology’s (NIST) security guidelines for tablets and mobile phones will pave the way—and set the expectation—for state and local governments to securely use mobile devices while meeting their organizational objectives.

Are state and local government networks secure enough for the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend? Should they be? Current research indicates that most state and local government networks have little or no BYOD program in place, leaving potentially vulnerable holes in their network security. As the trend grows, it is necessary to develop programs ensuring data security across all platforms.

The latest research by Network World and SolarWinds is telling. They found that 60 percent of government agencies surveyed said their agencies didn’t have the appropriate tools to manage personal devices on the enterprise network. Yet the same percentage said their agency allows any employee-owned device to be connected to the network.

And if government employees are as careless as the enterprise end users surveyed by Harris Interactive and security solutions provider ESET, the public sector should take BYOD-related security issues seriously. Nearly a third of those who use their laptop for work use it to connect to public wireless networks; about the same number said that their data and files are not encrypted. About 46 percent of those surveyed have allowed someone else to borrow the personal device they use at work; 37 percent haven’t activated auto-lock.