16 – 18 June 2015
ExCeL, London
the flagship event of
London Technology Week.
Business agenda: IT thinkers talk mobility, apps and security
Senior IT teams will be out in force for Interop (16 – 18 June 2015), the flagship event of London Technology Week. Ahead of the show, we spoke to some of the industry speakers and senior IT decision makers about how they are adapting to an increasingly digitised environment and other current technology priorities
A recent poll of IT decision-makers by Interop London confirmed that mobility is a top priority for UK businesses, with 88% confirming that they are currently exploring solutions to facilitate a more flexible, mobile working environment.
Hiten Vadukul, Enterprise Architect at the global fitness chain Virgin Active and a member of the Interop Advisory board is currently going through the process. He believes that mobility projects should have a clear purpose and concentrate on facilitating collaboration and seamless working, confirming that “as part of our workplace strategy, we are looking to standardise the user experience across mobile, tablet and desktop devices”.
Other current IT priorities highlighted in the UK poll moving from on-premise to cloud-based solutions, relocating data to a cloud-hosted server and improving security. Meanwhile, approximately two thirds (63%) said they were on the hunt for new technology solutions to help solve business or industry-specific problems.
Mobile digital workplace
With the current focus on facilitating employee and business-owned mobile devices across business networks, in future, analysts predict a growing shift towards the use and development of corporate apps. According to Gartner, this will result in one in four enterprises having an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices by 2017.
Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst and Managing Partner at the Real Story Group, will be giving a presentation on mobile platforms for business at Interop.
[quote_box_center]She said: “Facilitating a mobile digital workplace for employees continues to be big priority for CIOs and HR teams and in the last couple of years, a huge amount of progress has been made in this area.
“However, while the technology now exists to build interactive business apps very quickly and tailor them to different types of devices, as yet, many firms don’t have a strategy for it.
“In future, the focus in terms of mobile digital workplace will continue to be the use of web-based technologies to facilitate document access. One area where we are likely to see the digital workplace being ‘appified’ is in sales, which will continue to make it easier for sales teams to track leads and communicate leads. We also anticipate the growing use of ‘phablets’ (phone and tablet hybrid devices) to carry out workflow-oriented tasks such as sharing, editing and approving documents.” [/quote_box_center]
Securing the enterprise
When questioned about the security threats facing their organisations, almost two-thirds (62%) of senior IT professionals polled by Interop said that unintended user errors such as accidental malware uploads and data loss presented their biggest security challenge – far more than 13% who were most concerned about external attacks from hackers, cloud storage and third-party data hosting, or unsupported personal devices.
“People are producing more data from more devices than ever before,” said Virgin Active’s Vadukul. “Keeping this secure is not optional – unless you’re prepared to risk brand reputation. This is why businesses continuously need to adapt and improve when it comes to securing sensitive data.”
David Stanley, Head of IS Operations at thetrainline.com and a member of the Interop London advisory board also advocates taking a proactive approach to security threats, saying that for his organisation “security and compliance isn’t about spotting and fixing a problem – it’s about doing everything we can to ensure we don’t have one in the first place.”
David Self, Head of PMO at the multinational media company UBM made the point that, as data-driven enterprise, losing data could mean losing competitive advantage. For this reason, his team “always ensures security is a major part of any new process or developments from the outset and always equips company devices with high-level security applications”.
Mindful of the risk posed by unintended user action, he believes that “the only way to counteract the security challenge is to educate the business about the risks”.
For more information, see: londontechnologyweek.co.uk/2015/01/interop-london-2/
