It’s impossible to ignore. Technology is evolving at an astonishing pace, and major business trends like BYOD, Cloud and UCC are introducing new complexities and challenges for leaders in every business unit – not just within IT.

In fact, the very role of IT is changing the world over, as end-users now make their own choices when it comes to the hardware and software they use – often without the support (or blessing) of IT.

Every organization faces these challenges – whether they realize it or not. And while trying to solve these problems on your own is one approach, there is a better way – one that leverages the collective experiences of senior business leaders who are facing the same challenges (and threats) as you.

Strength in numbers
In response to these emerging business trends, our team has launched the Softchoice Innovation Office, a practice designed to help clients build their vision for the future.

One of our first initiatives is a facilitated community we call the Innovation Executive Forum (IEF). The IEF is a series of in-person peer-to-peer roundtables, and includes access to a private LinkedIn group where members debate and exchange ideas based on their common challenges.

The IEF provides an opportunity for members to first understand a trend, and then evaluate whether it is valid for them or not. It’s also a great opportunity for member clients and the Softchoice team to work collaboratively and develop fresh business strategies that drive competitive advantage and differentiation.

The results are in
The first Innovation Executive Forum event was recently held in Toronto and included a group of customer CIOs and VPs who met for dinner and conversation with Softchoice CEO David MacDonald, Innovation Office Director Aaron Brooks, Softchoice CIO Kevin Wright, Softchoice Director of Consulting Erika Van Noort and Richard Carson, Manager, Services Marketing.

The topic for the inaugural roundtable was BYOD. We’ve summarized the discussion from the evening in this short report. The topics covered during the roundtable:

• What Makes a Trend A Megatrend?
• BYOD: A Discussion of 5 Use Cases
• CIO Perspective: Why BYOD is seen as an inflection point in the role of IT
• CIO Perspective: Primary Concerns and Top Considerations
• Summary / Next Steps
• Appendix Case Study: The Softchoice BYOD Journey

> download the report now

The goal of the IEF is to build a community of business leaders across North America who are interested in collaborating on new and innovative solutions and services.

More IEF forums are planned across North America in the coming months. If you’d like to find out when the next roundtable is happening in your area, please leave a comment below, or email me.

In a recent an article on CIO.com, Tom Kaneshige ponders the inevitability of class-action lawsuits by users whose companies cross the divide between the personal and the corporate in a BYOD environment. The blending of personal and company data and applications on user-owned devices becomes a potential minefield. What if company applications are collecting location data on employees after hours? What if IT accidentally does a remote wipe of users’ devices and erases their personal contacts, apps and data?

On the other hand, users expose the company system to potential compromise, too. Rogue apps, insecure Wi-Fi networks and generally poor security practices all pose an element of risk to the company network.

That’s why it’s critical to have a comprehensive BYOD policy up front — and equally critical that employees understand its implications. And defining a BYOD policy guides the technology decisions you’ll make further down the road.

So what goes into a good BYOD policy? Softchoice has had a BYOD policy in place now for about 12 months, and we’ve identified five things (the hard way) that need to be included in your BYOD usage policy from day one.

1. Who pays (and how). With employer-issued devices, the company shoulders a predictable cost. This is not the case for BYOD, since users can purchase from a wide selection of mobile devices. Put together a cost-neutral arrangement for device and data expense coverage and take into account a reasonable refresh rate.

2. Which devices and operating systems. Broadly speaking, there are two types of devices – laptops and mobile devices (including tablets). Policies may differ to reflect the device being used – for example, a 4G mobile connection has embedded security features that laptops connecting over WiFi don’t. Companies concerned about security and support costs might consider a “white list” of devices and operating systems that qualify for the BYOD program.

3. Who has access to what (aka Role-based access). Not everyone needs mobile access to every element of the company system, nor every company application. One common approach to this is role-based access is to assign each user a predefined profile that matches the needs of their corporate role. This also defines responsibility for management of the devices i.e. who’s responsible for installing or uninstalling corporate applications, pushing out updates, etc.

4. Clearly define company versus personal assets. What apps, data and features does the company have access to and control over? As an example, if corporate and personal contact information are stored in one place and a salesperson moves to a competitor, how does the company delete those sales prospects without wiping Mom’s phone number? Can the company use a device’s GPS capabilities to track employees? Here’s where a #mobile device management (MDM) platform# <link to Meraki slick> like Meraki can make a huge difference. But it’s still critical that the parameters between exactly what personal vs. business data is wiped need to be clearly defined and understood by the employee upfront.

5. Security requirements. For many employees, the definition of “workspace” is fluid — office, home, hotel, airport, coffee shop. It’s one of the attractions of mobility. But open environments can be insecure. That Wi-Fi hotspot in the cafe might not be secure, or worse, might actually be a rogue laptop collecting data. A BYOD policy has to define standards for public wireless use, like encryption types and virtual private network (VPN) access, when employees are connecting to the company network.

A BYOD policy also has to cover devices and data at rest. If the user’s device has sensitive data, particularly customers’ personal information, a BYOD policy should spell out encryption requirements and data loss prevention (DLP) protocols. Consider the number of headlines about personal data lost on USB sticks! Data leakage is a very real problem, and a potentially expensive one.

While a solid BYOD policy is complex, it’s critical to start from a policy and let that direct technology decisions, not the other way around. Retrofitting your solution to account for unforeseen issues is expensive and inefficient.

A good place to start is to evaluate where you stand now. Softchoice’s Mobile TechCheck service helps catalogue and identify mobile devices within the business and evaluate their impact.

What would you add (or remove) from this list? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll update the post.

Innovation: it’s a word ranked in the top 10 of the most overused marketing terms in the past few years. You see it everywhere you go. It’s used to describe everything from new cars and smartphones to sports equipment and food.

While there are countless books written on this topic, it should be noted that a lot of these book were written years before the term became common place in our vocabulary. Today, one thing is for certain…innovation itself is evolving, and going through its own changes.

The root cause of this change relates to a renewed focus on the “why”…the purpose, cause or belief that is the driving motivation for action. Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is well known on the topic of why, and I think it offers a good explanation of why companies like Apple succeed. What’s missing is how the “new” innovation impacts today’s marketplace.

I would add in the following three trends that contribute to the evolution of innovation we’re seeing with clients everday.

The Crowd
It used to be cliché, being just one of the crowd, but now most new innovations are sparked from, and driven by the crowd. Opening up traditional R&D departments to embrace the ideas and input from a larger group of employees, partners, customers and even competitors, can drive more creativity into a once heavily process driven, internally focused experience. Leveraging social media and including diverse groups does a number of other things for a company outside of generating great ideas such as:

• helping to socialize what is important to an organization,
• creating awareness of new services and solutions,
• building better relationships that create an environment of open communication and collaboration to mutual benefit.

Technology
What hasn’t happened in technology? It would probably take less time to explain that than going over the advancements in technology in the past few years. The point here is that with technology advancing at such a rapid pace, less focus is being put into the “features and benefits race” and technology is desperately redefining its meaning by linking to business outcomes. IT and the role of the CIO are changing, IT needs to become an enabler of technology, not a gatekeeper to technology.

Culture
People are driven by much more than money, they are driven by a number of elements that are summed up by Daniel Pink in his book “Drive”. He touches on 3 key elements that drive behavior, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

People are looking for more, they want to feel a sense of ownership, they want to feel aligned to a purpose that is bigger than themselves, they want to feel a sense of accomplishment and learn new things. What does this have to do with Innovation you ask…well, quite a bit actually. The biggest change to innovation is coming at the cultural level where organizations are seeking to foster an environment of innovation that empowers everyone to look at things differently and to seek advances in how things are done.

In the end, innovation is about change, looking at new ways of doing things. Taking into consideration the “why”, opening it up to “the crowd” and leveraging “technology” to support business initiatives is the key to innovation in any company. Is it perfect? Will you get it right the first time? Probably not, but the “culture” you create in getting there will bring benefits far greater than the output of the process itself.

At Softchoice, we’ve recently created a new Innovation Office with a dedicated team focused on researching the biggest trends our customers are facing. Our goal is to design processes, services and systems that help customers capitalize and realize returns on upcoming trends related to their own business strategies. The Softchoice Innovation Office is unique in the opportunity it provides to customers to participate in the co-development and structured idea sharing of new services and solutions with us.

You’ll be hearing lots more from us soon. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on innovation?

How is your organization managing it? Leave your comments below and let’s start a dialog!

There are a lot of differing opinions floating around these days about “Storage Tiering” and the different methods of achieving it. Before we get into some of the popular approaches you’ll read about, let’s talk about why tiering is important.

The “need” for storage tiering stems from the fact that different types of drives have different performance metrics associated with them. When we talk about random IOPS, the following table indicates some rough sizing guidelines that architects can use to ballpark a solution.

While there are other factors like read/write ratio, raid types, block sizes and random/sequential workloads, this post isn’t about how to size a storage solution, it’s about why storage tiering is relevant to you.

When you compare these tables, one thing is obvious – SSD drives perform the best but are cost-prohibitive. This is why we don’t use SSD for everything. In the past, the only way to balance cost and performance was to have a “fast” pool of storage made up of 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm drives, and a “slow” pool of storage made up of 7,2000rpm drives which were far less expensive per terabyte.

That meant whenever we deployed a new application or service, we’d need to manually determine if that application would reside on the “fast’ or the “slow” pool of storage.

You may notice I keep putting fast and slow in quotes – this is because even though a 7,200rpm drive may provide fewer IOPS per spindle than a 15,000rpm drive, it’s not necessarily slower. If we have a pool of storage made up of qty 20 – 7,200rpm drives vs a pool of qty 6 – 15,000rpm disks, which is faster?

The 20-drive 7,2000rpm pool would have a ballpark IOPS rating of 1600 IOPS, whereas the 15,000rpm disk drive pool would only have 1080 IOPS for the “fast” pool.

The purpose of these tiering technologies really allows us to take different drive types and blend them into a single pool of storage – and then have the array manage which types of data reside on which type of disk. This forgoes the need of worrying about “fast” and “slow” disk types, since they’re all just different buckets of IOPS that we have created a single pool out of. This approach drastically reduces our storage management since we no longer need to decide if an application should go on “fast” or “slow” disk.

Storage tiering is great from a technical perspective. It’s also less management for better performance. So how how does it save you money? If money were no object, we’d simply build arrays completely out of SSD and tiering technology wouldn’t be relevant at all. Unfortunately, we all live in the real world where building all-SSD arrays for general workloads isn’t often the most fiscally responsible thing to do.

What tiering allows us to do is look at your data center requirements and build to what you need. If we were to define our requirements as “30TB at 10,000 IOPS” – we could then use ALL of the different drive types to meet those requirements in a manner that has the least cost, but still meets those requirements. We’re no longer stuck at deciding what drive type we want to use at the onset of the architecture.

Expansion is the other great use case for storage tiering. Once upon a time if we ran out of capacity in our “fast” pool, we’d need to add “fast” disk even though the performance was adequate. Applying storage tiering, we can add expensive high performance SSD drives when we’re out of performance, or cost-effective 7,200rpm drives when we’re out of capacity. Being able to balance cost and performance as we scale is huge!

While trying to predict what your storage performance requirements will be years in the future is impossible – maintaining the flexibility to grow in the most cost-effective manner results in huge savings.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the different types of tiering available in the market.

BYOD embodies many requirements that stretch outside the traditional realm of IT including change management, policy development and program delivery. We recognize there’s a disconnect between business and IT as it relates to BYOD – and this is what we’re doing to help our clients navigate with the launch of the Softchoice Innovation Office.

The Business Is Seeking Outcomes

BYOD has landed in the corporate backyard. It might have been launched by a request at the executive boardroom, or a new mobile workforce enablement strategy. It may be the influence of Gen-Y’ers entering the workforce brandishing their favorite mobile device, and insisting on keeping it.

Attract the best talent. Increase sales and marketing productivity. Improve the end-user computing experience. These are the demands that are impacting your business. And they’re all core to a solid BYOD strategy.

Why IT struggles with BYOD

After a quick look at your existing arsenal of IT tools, and weaponry and you may find gaps between technology and business strategy. Point technology may exist for certain BYOD circumstances, but how will the solutions align to the current and future organizational goals?

Now is the opportunity for IT leadership to take a progressive stance towards adopting BYOD and delivering a technical foundation that can support new strategies.

In many cases, hundreds of complex decisions paralyze IT leaders from taking a proactive stance on BYOD – some streaching far beyond the realm of traditional IT service porfolios. Most react to the immediate demands of the business related to BYOD, due in part to IT’s lack of bandwidth, staff or capacity to collect the right data, define and implement a well-rounded BYOD strategy.

Technology alone won’t plug the holes. To accelerate BYOD Outcomes, IT must implement a holistic, Architectural, Policy & Change Management Program. That’s why Softchoice’s newly formed Innovation Office is engaging customers throughout North America in a new way.

An Innovation-Centered Approach to BYOD

Softchoice has launched an North American Innovation Office focused on co-creating services that address BYOD and other major IT trends hand-in-hand with our clients. We’re bringing together forward-thinking leaders to learn, debate and exchange ideas on how to capitalize and realize returns on upcoming trends related to business strategies like BYOD.

Want to get involved?

We’re looking for progressive leaders in a variety of industries to participate with us in the development of our next generation Alpha and Beta programs related to trends impacting their business. Client participation is limited to 10 Alpha Customers per new service. By participating, you’ll receive exclusive access to our unique Innovation Executive Forums and introductory co-development pricing.

If you’d like to learn more about how your organization could partner with Softchoice, please contact us at innovationoffice@softchoice.com.

It’s funny how things evolve so quickly. Just a few years ago, the thought of employees using their own phones or laptops for work at work was unthinkable.

But as the consumerization of IT trend grows from a trickle to a flood, many organizations have no choice but consider how to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. And the experience at Softchoice was no different.

Francis Li, Softchoice’s VP of Information Technology, faced this dilemma a couple of years ago and says “Initially we were resistant to the idea of BYOD, primarily because of security concerns around our corporate data. How could we control access to our valuable corporate assets with all kinds of devices accessing our networks?”

But then a couple of surprising things happened. First, some users who were eligible to receive corporate mobile devices were choosing not to do so. If they didn’t want a corporate device, what were they using?

Then, as part of a regular network review with one of our own TechChecks, IT discovered that over 150 non-standard corporate devices were connected to the network – which meant a lot of personal devices were already being used to access company data.

Subtle changes lead to fundamental change

Because an “underground” BYOD program was already underway, Li and other Softchoice leaders decided the time had come to re-evaluate their philosophy around personal device usage.

Additionally, the company also was noticing that costs for corporate owned mobile devices were growing as staff increasingly used them not only for work, but for personal emails, web surfing, on vacations and through loss and replacement of devices.

Li says “ We realized that what we were seeing was a fundamental change in how the company’s users were using their corporate mobile and laptop technologies, and it was having a direct impact on our costs, the ability of IT to support and control the environment and potentially impacting our data security. “

Not just a technology project

Li and his team recognized BYOD was something that would impact the whole company – it would require wholesale changes to our IT infrastructure, our usage and people management policies. It also required a shift in thinking in how to balance the security needs of the organization, with the demands of employees using devices of their own choosing where and when they wanted to use them.

First Steps

The IT Team analyzed employees’ mobile device usage, categorizing users by departments, studying use patterns and determining where possible, what amount of usage was corporate and what was personal. To the team’s surprise, the analysis showed that in some cases personal usage was 25% or even higher.

A thorough review was also conducted on corporate laptops and PCs to determine the number and type of Service Desk tickets received over the past year, the type of repairs, loss and replacements required and if there were password and authentication issues.

After a thorough analysis, the IT team shared their findings with the company’s department heads to source their thoughts on how to manage the increasing costs and employees expectations.

A cross-departmental BYOD committee was created to review the issues, and with the participation of HR, IT and Legal departments, a strategy was formulated laying out two plans for employees.

Mobile Plan: All employees select their own mobile device. A monthly stipend is allotted to cover acquisition and data usage costs and anything above the set limit is the employees’ responsibility, including all support and maintenance costs.

Laptop Plan: Employees who prefer to select their own laptops receive a stipend to cover acquisition and support; costs in excess of the stipend are the employee’s responsibility. The allowance, provided every fourth year, assumes a 3 year lifespan per laptop and requires employees to also purchase a 3 year warranty agreement to ensure support and maintenance.

Security Solutions
Security concerns, initially a huge drawback to implementing a BYOD laptop program, were resolved when the IT team developed a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment, ensuring centralized access control and security. Mobile device security was managed by a mandatory 4-digit password for users accessing MS Active Sync (for Exchange). The IT team is also currently evaluating options for MDM solutions, to implement in the next phase.

Enabling BYOD
Now with a solid plan and infrastructure in hand, the BYOD committee gauged employee interest by distributing an employee survey. The results showed that everyone was excited about BYOD and viewed the transition as a progressive, proactive strategy that would enhance their employee experience. About 20% of employees chose to go with their own laptop, and Li expects that number to grow as employees become more familiar with the program.

The Results
Softchoice launched the program in Fall 2012 and a few months into it, Li thinks it has been a resounding success.

“Feedback from employees has been very positive. Whether a user is managed by Softchoice or they’ve selected the self-service option, the user experience is the same. Users find themselves to be more productive working on devices of their choice, and they are more conscientious about maintaining their own devices.“ says Li.

“In addition BYOD has let the IT team become more strategic as we move away from delivering IT support. We can focus more on business outcomes and leveraging technology to accomplish the results the company wants. Best of all, our costs are now completely predictable which is a huge advantage to the business.”

The Future of BYOD

Li thinks the future may be a totally internet-enabled workforce. Eventually organizations will no longer procure and manage any devices, and everyone will use the device of their own choosing.

Software as a Service ( SaaS) applications have made it easier for people to choose what applications they want to use, when they want to use them. It just seems logical to allow users to access their favourite applications on the device of their choice as well.

For organizations thinking about starting their own program, Li has this advice, “Be sure to get a baseline read on your BYOD landscape first, to find out what’s already in place. Every organization probably has some element of BYOD now and it will only grow. Assessing your current environment and ensuring that you have a thorough set of policies to clearly identify the roles and responsibilities are key to BYOD success.”

So whether you call it Bring Your Own Device, (BYOD), Bring Your Own Computer ( BYOC) or Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), device diversity is here to stay. Mastering your own BYOD balancing act might be that great opportunity to provide employees with the technology they want, while increasing productivity, reducing costs and positioning your organization as progressive and cutting edge – a great home for innovation and new young talent.

Like it or not, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) isn’t going away. While everyone agrees it’s a good idea to plan for the inevitable, few know what to expect.

To give you an idea, we put together a list, compiled in part from first-hand experience of doing it ourselves, of the impacts you can expect when implementing a BYOD strategy.

Increases in worker productivity

One of the most important benefits of adopting a BYOD strategy is that workers are happier, and therefore more productive, when using customized devices of their choosing.

In a July 2012 study commissioned by Trend Micro, researchers surveyed 202 companies in the U.S., U.K. and Europe, all of which had adopted some form of BYOD.  Seventy per cent of them reported their goal had been to achieve higher worker productivity, while another 70 per cent of those reported actual increases in their bottom line revenues as a result.

Attracting and retaining new talent

Attracting fresh new talent is core to any businesses success. And BYOD is often seen as a great tactic to do just that. Talented young employees will go wherever they feel most comfortable – a­nd their comfort level may be highest when they’re allowed to whip out their Macbook instead of plonking away on the company machine.

The costs balance out – for the most part

It may be tempting to think of BYOD as a way to save money and reduce help desk tickets. But in the same Trend Micro study, help desk costs actually increased. Which really underlines the need for your BYOD strategy to draw the line and clearly communicate the responsibility the user has to maintain his/her own device.

With employees on the hook for their own hardware, IT desks get the added bonus of not dealing with “mysterious” epidemics of hardware malfunctions, which just so happened to coincide whenever the latest, greatest Blackberry came to market. Never again receive an email with the subject line: “I swear the phone totally just landed in the toilet.”

Still, in our experience, most companies offer a subsidy for employees to put toward their own device. And the cost savings of not buying and managing the hardware seem to break even.

Make it a team effort…or else

Most IT leaders don’t have the time to navigate through the HR policies, legal and tax ramifications, and budgeting necessary in developing a BYOD strategy.

Which is why BYOD is not an IT project – it’s a project for the entire company. In order to be effective, multiple departments need to be involved. Consider organizing a committee of people from all tiers of the company to ensure no aspect is overlooked. Otherwise, you could have a few costly gotchas, such as having to tax those subsidies as income, or determining which budgets to pull from.

Over the years, data centers became fragmented, with numerous types of proprietary software living in silos inside specialized hardware components – making them complex and frustrating to manage. Today, virtualization helps absorb and minimize this challenge, but creates another: Server and application sprawl from explosive data growth.

Server and application sprawl will cost you

A sprawl of uncontrolled and poorly managed application deployments leads to ‘application unavailability’ that endangers an organization’s profitability. Numerous examples of this continue to sprout up all around us. For example, do you remember the Amazon datacenter failure? I always like to remember an article I read that states:

“As business becomes increasingly dependent on technology and information, availability is a universal concern for every business, in every industry…And  globalization means there are no more periods of  ‘acceptable’ downtime. At any time of the day or night, somewhere in the world, customers and vendors need access to your corporate information. If they can’t get it, they’ll go elsewhere – creating an opportunity for your  competition.”

- David M. Fishman, Sun MicroSystems, Application Availability: An Approach to Measurement

I was young, and I have to admit that it touched me and created a sense of urgency. Maybe this is why I am so passionate about what I do today. Considering the problem of server and application sprawl, automation and ease of management are no longer a ‘nice to have’ they are a MUST. With this in mind, where do you start?

Today’s Data Center: a collection of bad IT decisions

All-too-often, when I walk into a customer’s data center, it reflects a collection of bad IT decisions. Too many static apps, too many servers and multiple data siloes endanger the profitability of an organization that is asking for overall thin management capabilities. This is certainly NOT the conversation we wish to have with a C-Level – at least I don’t!

Do you dream that your data, applications, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan (BCDR) and data management are all part of a unique single-minded strategy? So much so, that the strategy makes up your ‘normal’ day to day datacenter operations – allowing you to focus on the core applications you need to esnure the growth of your organization?

For some, it seems too good to be true.

Sustaining growth in a siloed environment

Even with the issues mentioned above, we are all magicians somehow. Somehow IT folks sustain organizational growth with cost control year over year. Today, I believe that all of the pieces are available out there, and it is up to us to define where the information lives! Now, there are many different approaches to solve this, but we must agree on this: With or without a single-minded data management strategy, organizations must build or buy mission critical applications that streamline business processes.

The pressure of big data

Big data, also known as ‘information explosion,’ is the effect of a rapid increase in data that hits medium and large organizations hard. While the amount of available data grows it presses on data siloes, and the problem of sorting, storing and handling all of this information becomes increasingly difficult. Bottom line: this is why data management solutions should be a core component of your BCDR strategy.

Do we hope this pressure will stop? Yes. But will it stop? Get ready friends, the world is expecting a data explosion of 130 Exabytes. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2011 to 2016, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold over the next five years, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month – or an annual run rate of 130 exabytes by 2016.

Hold on a minute…2016? That’s in 3 years.

For example, Softchoice recently released a data management engagement for a large Canadian customer. They experienced rapid data growth and felt unable to maintain control of how their IT environment was handling the data. Why did this happen? Well, the consumerization of IT creates unstructured data, and unstructured data represents an average of 80% of the entire data center, leaving 20% for structured data.

In this case, since the available storage capacity per disk had increased, IT simply added more disks to solve for data growth and save money. However, the added capacity was a retroactive approach to solve their data growth problems. IT must maintain control of what, where, when and how incoming data is stored in the data center – at all times. With this in mind, IT must proactively search for holistic data center solutions to control and manage the growth of unstructured data.

How much do we fear data will grow in each organization alone? Gartner Director, April Adams, reported in 2012 that data capacity on average, in enterprises, grows at 40 percent to 60 percent year over year. This is much more than the 30% year over year we’re used to, don’t you think?

Unstructured and structured data is the lifeblood of all organizations, and I have seen more and more customers turning to Softchoice struggling with an increasing amount of data stored in their datacenter and asking us how to manage the exponential growth of data and the consumerization of IT (link).

The bottom line: data management is critical

While the ability to store increasing amounts of data empowers organizations, it also presents them with the challenge of managing all of that information.

I like to call this activity “balancing the data center” and I believe achieving this successfully is made of a precise combination of top-notch technologies with a strong roadmap that integrates well with your unique business processes. Bottom line: we want a solution that and is capable of automatically adapting to a changing environment and this solution must be easy to manage through policies while relying on equipment from top manufacturers in the industry.

Want to know more? Are you interested in understanding what Softchoice does differently and how we do it? What issues are you facing? Reach out, ask the question, leave a comment! Get prepared with the people that see it every day and are continuously looking at it. We surely don’t want to get caught in the wave of data.

Let’s start with the obvious.

There is no silver bullet, one-size-fits-all checklist for creating the perfect Bring Your Own Device strategy. Every organization is completely different.

But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Many of the technologies necessary to support a strategy are probably already in your ecosystem. It’s just a matter of knowing what’s missing, and how to leverage what you’ve already got.

To give you a hand, we’ve assembled seven tools and technologies that make planning and executing your BYOD strategy a reality.

1. Application Virtualization or Presentation

There are two approaches to delivering business apps to a device you are not in control of – for example, personal smartphones or tablets: Application Virtualization and Presentation.

The key difference between them is where the processes run. Presentation consumes the resources of a Terminal Server (TS) or Remote Desktop Server (RDS). This is a great approach when you need to deliver native Windows apps to non-Windows devices. Just make sure you’ve looked into server licensing requirements when doing that.

Application Virtualization consumes the resources of the destination device, such as a laptop. A key benefit is software compatibility. IT creates a Virtualized package based off the supported operating system (OS), say Windows XP, and is then able to stream that package to a non-supported OS, like Window 7.

Note that the destination device must support the Application Virtualization agent. So you could not take a Windows application and stream it to a Mac.

2. VDI or Desktop Virtualization

Another approach is presenting an entire Windows desktop to an employee-owned device using VDI or Desktop Virtualization. The value here is that users consume resources in the data center, and not on the local device. Similar to Application Presentation, desktop virtualization uses a display protocol to deliver the entire desktop to personal devices. This solution is good for different reasons. For example, it’s ideal when an application can’t be virtualized, or the application itself needs more access to a virtualized client operating system.

Keep in mind when you choose this delivery model, a Microsoft Virtual Desktop Argent (VDA) license is required.

3. Cloud brokerage solutions

Where and how does cloud fit into your BYOD strategy? SaaS or IaaS offerings are venues to offload internal resources to a cloud provider, and often clients will employ several – which gets complicated.

One approach is becoming an Internal Cloud Broker for your organization, leveraging a holistic solution like Softchoice Cloud. This type of platform lets you find and buy SaaS apps, manage and deploy them to personally-owned devices, federate them securely through Active Directory, and get the 24/7 support you need to make your users happy.

4. Mobile Device Management

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a powerful tool to securely manage the network access of employee-owned devices.

The main upside of MDM is that it enables IT to handle entire fleets of devices at once, setting the policies and access restrictions, without having to deal with every device individually. All users are required to do is sign-in to an app or web page, and you automatically push the correct configuration to that user, based on his/her profile.

A good MDM solution example would be Airwatch, which offers great compliance control via a SaaS solution.

5. Wifi bandwidth

One common “gotcha” for BYOD is WiFi. When most organizations rolled out the wireless networking technology, the majority of employees connected via Ethernet. In today’s world of instant-on devices, large organizations barely have enough WiFi infrastructure to support a fraction of the total employee base.

What we regularly see in mobility assessments is that our clients frequently underestimate the sheer volume of outside devices connecting to their infrastructure.

6. Data Loss Prevention

Data Loss Prevention is a good idea if you want to make sure certain types of data are simply not allowed to leave the network.

For instance you probably don’t have any reason to allow credit card numbers, or social security numbers to leave the premises via email. By establishing policies and leveraging technologies that stop the most sensitive data from leaking (preventing certain kinds of attachments or types of data), you are insulating yourself from risk. So when an employee loses their personal Android device, the risk to your organization is mitigated – and it hopefully also means one less headache for you.

7. Network Access Control and Authentication for Guests

It’s very common for visiting clients or guests to require access the internet at your office. The risk, of course, is having unmanaged (and non-secure) client devices connecting to your corporate network.

With NAC, you can easily do just that. A good example of a NAC is Cisco ISE, a policy-control platform that is device- and location-aware.

A NAC also allows you to implement security policies in place that dictate what a user can- and can’t – access remotely. For example: users can’t access tier-1 apps from their local Starbucks… but coming from a trusted environment like their home office, they can.

You’ve decided to open up your organization to BYOD — so what’s next? Along with mobile devices comes the need for mobile apps.

One question that constantly arises: Which of our business applications should be made available on a mobile platform? While common apps that employees use every day (like CRM) are solid contenders, not every app will – or should – be available as an app. Think about the practicality of filling out a timesheet spreadsheet on a smartphone.“There are apps that help you with the day-to-day business, like CRM, tracking and ordering — ones that you want to get into the hands of your ever-increasing mobile workforce,” said Doug Sekus, director of business development for servers and virtualization with Softchoice.

There are other apps to consider too – like those that get you closer to customers and employees. “Because of the proliferation of mobile devices, smart companies are leveraging mobility in more creative ways, not just putting apps into a mobile format,” said Sekus.

While there’s often a misperception that apps can simply be extended to a mobile format, it’s not quite that easy. They likely need to be re-written or built from the ground up for a new form factor, potentially across several operating systems (depending on the company’s BYOD strategy).

If a company has its own development team, re-writing those apps or build new ones is one option. If an organization doesn’t have the internal resources or know-how, hiring a company specializing in this area is the best option.

There’s more than one approach to developing mobile apps. One is to develop brand-new apps that are specifically targeted to mobile devices. “If you develop apps that run on an iPhone, the advantage is you have a lot of control — you can develop for the device itself and leverage features such as GPS, Compass and Address Book,” said Sekus.

Sekus does caution that while this allows you to build a richer user experience, it also means you’re developing for a single device, which could lead to higher development costs — and may not fit in with your BYOD policy.

Web technologies like HTML5 have matured to the point where you can create meaningful apps just by pointing the mobile device at a web browser, said Sekus.

For the most part, companies are taking a cross-development approach that includes any mobile platform, whether that’s iOS, Android, Windows or BlackBerry — though this can also drive up development costs.

“One of the most important aspects of mobility is the user experience,” said Sekus. “Mobile users have very little patience — if you don’t offer a good user experience people will abandon the app.” Employees and customers alike will bypass the investment you’ve made in your brand because another app is simply easier to use.

“When developing an app for mobile devices, it has to be simple, it has to be purpose-built and it has to be limited in functionality,” he said. “Most business apps are too complicated.”

Developers should consider what they’re trying to accomplish. “Are you going to offer your users something they actually want and is there real value in delivering that mobile solution?” said Sekus. A CRM app, for example, offers myriad capabilities. On a mobile device, however, an employee might only need it to access customer information while they’re on the road.

“Taking the full functionality of an app to a mobile device is a flawed strategy,” said Sekus. “Consider the pieces of that app you’d like to take out to a mobile device, and then optimize that content from a viewing and performance perspective.” This may require writing new apps based on those pieces, he added.

That doesn’t mean you can’t offer users a rich, meaningful experience — you can keep it simple, but integrate maps, video, GPS, NFC or other tools to build a richer user experience.

The key to success is to solicit feedback from the people who use those mobile apps and to keep evolving them. “Once you’ve figured out why you want to do this, then you can put measurement criteria around it to see if you’re succeeding,” said Sekus. “The outcome is tied to why you’re doing this in the first place.”