Consumerisation of IT through 2013

The Consumerisation of IT has been a phrase encapsulating business IT for around 3/4 years and refers to the speed of pace which consumer focused IT is released and far outpaces the traditional speed of adoption associated with business IT. Ultimately ensuring the consumer has a better IT experience at home than when in the office.

Rather than thinking of this trend as a mobility issue, it should be thought of as an innovation and opportunity.

Over the past two years there has been much interest in BYOD but it’s important to remember this is only the start when it comes to the Consumerisation of IT.

The past two years has seen a big increase in the adoption of BYOD. This is not going to go away; there will be more BYOD and more usage within the enterprise. Organisations need to be prepared for more non-corporate devices accessing their networks.

Organisations that take this innovation opportunity seriously will realise that mobility/BYOD is not just about MDM. A new holistic approach to mobility will be about managing data and information wherever it maybe stored.

With increase of adoption comes increases in legal cases as corporate and personal data becomes blurred by the device. Organisations will need to weigh up the risk of privacy beaches against productivity gained as a result of Consumerisation of IT.

IT departments driven by thought leading CIO's will need to assess themselves. A shift towards providing IT consultancy and services for the business will be imperative.

Going to adopt BYOD or whatever you are calling it and don't know where to start? Contact Us for advice.

Whats on your 2013 Techmap?

So that's 2012 done and dusted with, which always brings about the questions what is going to be big this year and what was a hit last year.  So we thought we would have a quick punt on what 2013 might bring to businesses in the shape of technology.  

Over the years we have had a pretty good guess and what was coming down the line from VDI, through to ESN and Cloud.  The following tops the bill for us on what is going to be on your techmap at some point this year:

• Expect to see a significant rise with cloud built on Openstack, the project has gained fantastic momentum and shows no signs of slowing down.  Private Cloud built upon Public Cloud processes can only be a good thing
• Keeping on the opensource theme, expect Bigdata to become more strategic with Hadoop taking the lead.  Once tier 1 cloud providers position Hadoop as a Service the technology will become more accessible to the SMB market place
• Cloud services will be consumed with greater velocity meaning technology needs to be provided to aggregate these cloud services from personal through to private into a single pane of glass such as Citrix Cloud Gateway
• Symantec O3 should make a name for itself this year providing a sensible framework for SSO, Content and Security services again becoming a single pane of glass for cloud services
• Windows 8 was launched with Gusto in 2012 and expect it to make an appearance on a desk near you soon either through Windows XP desktop replacement or through BYO strategies
• Mobility will morph into Enterprise Mobility Management consuming BYO with it as the industry accepts its inevitable. Consumer choice will be delivered through Digital Allowance schemes and hopefully HMRC will provide clarity around tax implications.
• Another area of growth we expect to see happen over the next year [largely fuelled by BYO is the interest in Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAP), no longer is a single way of developing applications acceptable or affordable for businesses to adopt.  There has been significant promise of HTML5 being the development architecture of choice but this has yet to come to fruition.  It is clear that this is an opportunity within the market place to provide one framework to all devices, the browser maybe the right approach but that is yet to be seen.  There will still be a huge demand for native applications as they provide the most rich user experience to date.  The approach of mobilising applications will largely be driven through improved development skills as they need to adopt new design skills to deliver touch-optimised applications that operate across a range of devices
• In 2013 we also expect to see the main network operators roll out 4G networks. With continuous streaming of high speed data the move to mobile will change the world of screens at home and work as we know it.
• Certified cloud architectures such as Flexpod will continue to gain market share
• Office 365 will gain further momentum fuelled largely by the plethora of new Microsoft Workloads due for launch in 2013
• If you don't adopt cloud in your strategy then you can expect your users to circumnavigate the IT department and spin services up through AWS or Rackspace for example
• The software defined datacentre will get a lot of airtime this year largely driven by network vitualisation
• Apple will continue to dominate the tablet market with specific verticals being key adopters of the technology.
• We also expect to see business and industry drive their mobility proposition to the next level of maturity. On top of the considerable benefits seen from native iOS apps, companies are now investing strategically in business process re-engineering projects that drive savings and efficiency through native app development.  Links to ERP and CRM systems will give organisations access to core data and the functionality to operate from wherever they chose.

So that's what we think will be in your Techmap for 2013 but we know there will be more lurking around the corner.  It would be great to hear what solutions you are looking into.

Charles Barratt | Solutions Development Manager | Equanet

Citrix Releases VDI in a Box 5.2

Citrix has released version 5.2 of VDI-in-a-box. The VDI solution doesn’t require shared storage or dedicated load balanced connection brokers. It consists of a single virtual appliance that provides all the functionality needed to create, provision, manage, and load balance virtual desktops. The VDI-in-a-Box appliance, known as VDI-in-a-Box Manager runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor. vdiManager creates and manages virtual desktops on the local physical server by communicating with the local hypervisor.

Besides supporting the latest hypervisors in this release, Citrix is integrating the VDI-in-a-box product more and more with its existing products, like introducing support for Cloud Gateway and the ability to export images for use with XenDesktop.

Version 5.2 provides the following new features:

• Support for the hypervisors available in Windows Server 2012, XenServer 6.1 and vSphere 5.1 
• Support for StoreFront services provided by Citrix Cloud Gateway 
• Support for Microsoft Lync 
• Support for exporting of published images for use with Citrix XenDesktop 
• Licensing Management using Citrix License Server. 
• Support for multiple data stores 
• Support for virtual desktops running Windows Server 2012 (accessible using RDP only) 
• Automated desktop agent upgrade 
• Citrix Desktop Lock support.