BYOD – Yet another challenge for IT heads

For those, who are not familiar with the term BYOD, it stands for “Bring Your Own Device” and use it to achieve your work goals, be it within the company or anywhere else. A simple example for this is when an employee uses his own iPad to access his corporate emails, or use any other wi-fi enabled device to connect to corporate wi-fi network and use it to perform certain work related tasks. This has been in practice with the education and training companies, where the students / participants are expected to use their own devices, subject to meeting of the required minimal hardware and software specifications. Thanks to the last recession the recent explosion of the smart personal gadgets, companies are increasingly considering allowing this. 

The factors that drive the BYOD amongst corporate are:

1.  Increased Productivity - Employees are expected to be happy working on their favourite stuff and in turn that is likely to bring in increased productivity.
2. Better Mobility – Organizations with mobile workforce, who typically work on the move, feel that BYOD could offer better mobility and flexibility.
3. Cost Savings – Though this may not be a real benefit, as organizations may end up spending considerably on mitigating the risks that BYOD brings on board, this is considered as a factor driving the increased adoption.
4. Influence from senior executives – Typically if a senior executive buys a latest gadget and then using it in the workplace to do their work.
5. Decreasing client installs – With increased adoption of Cloud based applications, all that a user need to access the enterprise application is a compatible web browser and this favours BYOD.

Certainly BYOD brings on board a lot of challenges to the IT department and here are some of the key challenges:

1. Support – The IT department have to start supporting varying make and models of smart gadgets running different operating systems and web browsers. Unless the IT department comes up with the list of gadgets that they can support, it could soon be a nightmare.
2. Licensing – If there are certain third party components to be installed on the smart devices, then it is better to have the licensing terms of the component vendor verified, as some vendors may impose restrictions in installing such components on devices other than those owned by the organization.
3. Network and Application Security – When employees use the organization provided devices, they are appropriately hardened in line with the security policies of the organization. But in case of BYOD, the employees for sure would not like to have their devices hardened for work use, instead they would like to be the administrators of their own device and play with it in whatever way they want. On the other hand, employees may even go ahead and install more and more mobile apps of their choice, some of which could even be malware.
4. Data Security – Whatever data that is cached or stored on the gadgets, as the devices are used for work are subject to be easily compromised.

For sure, this is yet another challenge that the IT managers should be ready to face soon, if not now.  

Characteristics of SaaS Applications

The evolution of Cloud Computing has paved way to enterprises look at subscribing for SaaS applications as against licensing an application for exclusive use. The primary benefit being the cost savings due to centralization. As more and more enterprises are looking for Cloud and SaaS model for its application needs, the product companies are exploring options to enhance their existing products so that they can be offered on SaaS model. It is important to understand the key characteristics of the SaaS applications before planning for the conversion.

While the application should be accessible over the web is an important characteristic, the following other characteristics are also important to look at:

1. Multi-tenancy

Typically all applications support multiple users. But a SaaS application should support multiple users of different organizations. Which means there should be a mechanism to identify and appropriately differentiate the users of a specific organization. That is the application should support multiple tenants. The tenants would also be interested to have their data be isolated and not to be mixed up with that of other tenants. At the least, the SaaS application should have the ability to uniquely identify each and every data record against a tenant.

2. Subscription and billing mechanism

Organizations are embracing SaaS applications on the premise that they will be paying far less based on one or more parameters, which measure the usage by the specific tenant. For instance, SaaS application may be priced based on number of users or based on subscription and use of specific modules / features. Some times, the pricing may be even complex, where it could be based on the transaction volume or a combination of one or more such measures. So, the application should be capable of tracking and logging such parameters and that the billing could be automated.

3. Scalability

A typical web application is hosted on a separate instance owned and exclusively used by a specific tenant. Whereas in case of SaaS application, the provider owns the hosted instance, which is used by all the tenants. Though the provider has the option to host a separate instance for each tenant, the economy of scale would at its best when a single instance is offered for multiple tenants. Depending on the application's features and the wide reach amongst the potential customers, the customer base could grow so fast and the application should be scalable both horizontally and vertically to support the unexpected growth in volume.


4. Manageability

The tenants should have the ability to manage their part of the application including managing the users, roles, permissions, etc. As the subscription base grows, it would be ideal to leave the application management to the tenants themselves. This requires the application to have necessary features / functions for use by the tenants.

5. Self service sign-up

While self service sign-up is not a key characteristic, it is a highly desirable to have this feature when the customer base is expected to grow too fast. Similarly, on boarding a customer may involve data migration from a different application used by the tenants before. The SaaS application should expose appropriate interfaces / APIs to facilitate the migration. It would also be a desirable to expose APIs to facilitate export / back up of data by tenants themselves.

6. Tenant specific customization

Typically, product companies undertake to customize an application to meet the specific needs of the customers by enhancing the application. But this would not work in case of SaaS application, as all the tenants would typically be using the same version of the application. That means, the application should be highly customizable, so that it satisfies the specific needs of all the tenants. In a large scale SaaS application this is achieved by providing the ability to extend the application by defining and deploying specific screens and scripts by the tenants themselves.

That is not all. There are other characteristics too and some of them could be key depending on the nature and demands of the industry and the providers. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Here are some useful reference links that deal with the SaaS application challenges and characteristics.

• SaaS: an Enterprise perspective
• Challenges in converting existing web applications to a multi-tenant solution

Future of Personal Computer

With the evolution of smart phones and tablets, the survival of Personal Computer could be under threat. Let us examine, if there is a possible thing that PC alone can do.

Thick Client Applications: We have started seeing the increasing number of applications moving to the cloud and one just need a browser and may be an appropriate pug-in to run a cloud application. Even heavy weight applications like ERP suites and Business Intelligence Suites are now being offered over the cloud. In few years from now, I don't think there will be any compelling need to use a thick client application.

User Convenience:  Yes, a bigger monitor and a regular keyboard with a mouse will really be convenient to work on a PC. But do we need a PC just to have a bigger display and the key board? Not really, some of today's smart phones are dockable on to a device, which facilitates connecting to a bigger display and keyboard.

Higher Computing Power: When the applications are served out of Cloud, much of the processing happens elsewhere on some server(s) located over the cloud, and not much power is required on the client device. That is not the end, in few years from now, the smart phones / tablets will equally sport a high end processor with even multiple cores.

Extreme Gaming: Most of the popular games today are online games. Gamers also prefer online games which connects buddies from all over the globe to join and play together. More so, because the gaming service providers gain more in the form of Ad revenues in case of online games than Thick client games. Above all, there are special purpose gaming consoles in the market for extreme gaming.

Enterprise Computing: While it could be ideal to go with enterprise owned secured and locked down personal computers to access and process enterprise information, but that does not mean that they have to be PCs. Even now most enterprises are encouraging their employees to work from home on a Laptop, there by saving so much of energy costs at the physical location and at the same time commuting time for the employee. The evolving tablets could easily replace the Laptops.

Research firm Gartner slashed its growth forecast for the global PC market this year to 3.8 percent from 9.3 percent citing boom in media tablets.

You name one thing, we can think of how tomorrow's personal gadgets could address that. Would like to here from you on this trend.