Technology: Mobility - ' Viewpoint '
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Viewpoint Keith Waryas
We asked Keith Waryas, an IDC research manager and lead analyst for wireless business network services, for his thoughts on what CIOs should focus on in preparing for the explosion of mobile devices.
Beware Mobile Support
What should CIOs focus on with the proliferation of connected devices?
When you start taking applications out to a wide area network, and you start
talking about adding mobility to different types of applications through alternative
devices—things like phones and PDAs—it starts bringing support for
those devices onto the desks of IT professionals. And that can be a bit of
a challenge, because IT's expertise is usually in supporting a client/server
environment that's based on a notebook connected to a physical server inside
a confined corporate environment. Now you're talking about supporting an application
that's going to go on a wireless device that the IT guy has minimal amounts
of control over, the company has minimal control over—and has no control
over the [carrier] network. You're also talking about some of the
holiest of holy information leaving your corporate firewall, and going out
through a VPN connection, but still going over a proprietary network over
which you have no control at all.
What about integrating voice and data? How should IT deal with that process?
Voice has a great tolerance for error, and a very very low tolerance for
delay. Data, on the other hand—your e-mail, for instance—has a huge
tolerance for delay and extremely low tolerance for error. Trying to manage
that balancing act of controlling a single network with those two applications
can be really tricky. So what we've seen is that a lot of these companies
are looking to outside service providers, they're looking for outside help—sometimes
in the form of infrastructure providers, sometimes in the form of pure services—to
help make this process go easier.
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