Guest author Mat Young is senior technical director at Fusion-io.
Many enterprise employees no doubt received new tablets this Holiday season. And many are likely to bring them to work on Wednesday, January 2, 2013 – perhaps the biggest day ever for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.
Will corporate IT be prepared for the challenge?
Managing BYOD devices like tablets poses many security and compliance challenges. Forrester has predicted that that tablets would become the primary computing devices in 2013, so it will be instructive to watch how corporate IT policies evolve to support or discourage BYOD with tablets. (Of course, some lucky workers will end up with tablets provided to them by their employers!)
Recent research has noted that – not surprisingly – many tablet users use their devices for email. With traditional data-storage infrastructure, the added workload of all these new tablets connecting into corporate networks could create quite a strain on applications like Microsoft Exchange. If organizations are running virtualized infrastructure or virtual desktops (VDI), delivering consistent performance gets even more complicated.
Easy-to-use apps with data served from the cloud make tablets especially attractive to mobile workers. This has led to a boom in mobile applications. It will also be interesting to track how download and adoption rates for mobile apps delivered through the cloud are impacted by the BYOD influx in 2013.
Keeping on top of network performance will be a critical requirement for IT teams watching to see how the BYOD influx affects their infrastructure. One possibility is to boost the use of flash memory on the server side as well as on the device side.
From cell phones to tablets, NAND flash powers just about every mobile device. But investing in flash on the server-side as well can help improve performance of specific applications and remove overall bottlenecks.
As BYOD brings ever-more mobile devices into corporate environments, IT faces a very real challenge to keep up. The proud owners of all those new tablets will demand nothing less.
