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).

Originally posted by Gartner

A well-executed single sign-on (SSO) strategy reduces password-related support incidents and provides users with improved convenience and more-efficient authentication processes, according to Gartner, Inc. A sound SSO strategy will give users fewer reasons to write down passwords. However, one password providing access to all in-scope systems can lead to compromised access to those systems.

“Organizations implementing SSO, particularly to systems that hold sensitive data, should implement risk-appropriate authentication methods with the SSO system,” said Gregg Kreizman, research vice president at Gartner. “Solutions are not ‘one size fits all,’ and solutions that provide SSO to all target systems may be deemed too expensive. Therefore, a best practice is to identify the tactical and strategic approaches that reduce enough of the problem space over time and within budget.”

Mobile devices can pose further challenges for SSO. “The proliferation of mobile phones and tablets with a variety of operating systems has created the latest and greatest challenges to authentication and SSO,” said Mr. Kreizman. “Web-architected applications can often be supported with existing access management tools, such as Web access management (WAM) and federation, because smartphones and tablets have Web browsers. Native mobile resident applications can create a gap in SSO support, and market offerings to resolve the issues are currently immature, proprietary, or not comprehensive enough to support multiple device and operating system variants.”

Mobile Device Management is no picnic. Just ask anybody who’s doing it – or trying to.

On the surface of things, MDM doesn’t seem so tough. All you have to do is read the website of any major MDM vendor, and they’ll explain that they have the whole problem handled. Just buy their solution, and “problem solved.” But you don’t have look very hard to start finding chinks in the armor.

Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software Report is prefaced with the assertion that “MDM features have commoditized with little differentiation,” indicating that most offer the same strengths – and weaknesses. Perhaps the biggest limitation on MDM as a category is that the ability to actual manage devices is highly dependent on the mobile operating system each device is running – and all mobile OSes are not created equal in terms of their ability to be managed.