Device and Cloud Provider Proliferation
As a Cloud and Hosting Service Provider, niu is acutely aware of the pace at which end clients are looking to adopt cloud services, and deploy them universally within their estates. As things stand today, with cloud solutions still being in relatively ‘early adopter’ mode, people are seeing the benefits of application lead cloud deployment, sourcing individual applications from specialist vendors and providing those applications to their end users in a utility model.
Interestingly though, we think, niu is already investigating solutions to a problem that we feel is a bit further down the line, the convergence of two very powerful forces in the market today – device proliferation and ‘cloud provider’ proliferation.
As all IT professionals will have noticed, more and more end users are demanding their own style of devices to get access to their business applications. This breeds issues with data loss and user security, as well as asset control (if owned by the business) and user / asset administration.
As an isolated trend, this could be very easily managed. However, if you transpose this device hungry drive in the marketplace with the expanding need to manage multiple cloud application providers, and all associated costs/bills, userids and accounts, security, SLAs etc., your IT estate becomes an incredibly complex management overhead, that will require very slick processes in order to keep under control.
Imagine a new starter who has an iPad, a laptop and a smartphone (that’s three devices), all of which need to be business application enabled. This same new starter needs Cloud delivered Office Products, Cloud delivered CRM, Cloud delivered Email, and Cloud delivered Analytics functions (all from different Cloud Providers). This is when the new starter process becomes a convoluted implementation and configuration nightmare.
Issuing requests to vendors for new devices and application logons, configured securely and consistently across all devices, with an understanding of the process for wiping business data, and closing those accounts should the same user eventually leave the company. Cloud and Device Management together is going to be the next big headache for all IT Departments.
At niu Solutions we are integrating a range of tools and techniques to overcome these problems, which we’ll be productising and launching in the New Year.