Is The Cloud The Answer To Mobile Device Liability?

In case you missed it, the 2010 Mobile Enterprise Executive Summit, held by Mobile Enterprise Magazine, is taking place this week in Florida.  I’ve attended this event in the past, but couldn’t make my way there this year because of all the fun things going on here at EMF headquarters. Fortunately for us, Martha Walz, MEM’s Editor-in-Chief, provided a recap of Day 1 here.

There was one panel session that day that really struck me.  To quote MEM:

“The panel consisted of Luis Oliveira of Ignite Restaurant Group, Brendan O’Malley of Tasty Baking Co., and Ken Poinsette of Rollins, the parent company of Orkin.”

During the session O’Malley talked about individually liable devices.  To quote again from the article:

With the rise of consumer devices, he feels that security is essential. As such, his solution is to move to cloud-based data so that the devices themselves don’t hold sensitive information in the case that they are lost, stolen, or otherwise compromised. That’s his solution for fragmentation as well: hosting the applications in the cloud makes the applications themselves device- and OS-agnostic, and that way the company doesn’t have to create native apps in house on multiple OSes.

Wow.  That’s pretty powerful stuff. I fully agree that at the end of the day, security is essential.  This is why I keep on harping about how the debate around the ownership of the mobile device is far less important than the discussion that needs to arise around who owns what data on that device and how the data is managed.  Sure device management is important, no question, but the data is what really matters.  So is the answer to the whole individual vs. corporate liable device debate The Cloud???

I don’t think so.  That’s almost TOO easy…

There are two fundamental issues that O’Malley is trying to solve here in his statement:

1. Data protection and security
2. The complexity of developing applications for myriad mobile device platforms

I understand the attraction to this two pronged strategy.

1. Keeping the data in your own (private) cloud means that you as an IT administrator gets to protect everything the way you want to. However, the problem here is that there will be an increased demand on WWAN bandwidth.  Unfortunately, WWAN connectivity is neither ubiquitous nor fully reliable.  How many times have you been in a major city where you had spotty coverage from your carrier.  Sure, you can “fall back” onto a WiFi hotspot, but that opens up its own can of worms in terms of security and policy management and enforcement.  Another issue that comes up is performance.  The analog is IMAP email.  All the data resides on the server and you can access everything from where you are.  Have you ever used IMAP?  It’s slow as hell because it has to download everything all the time.  There’s a real benefit in terms of convenience of having data reside locally…it’s called performance.  We’ve also talked here before about how the more you rely on the cloud, the more you are going to have to think about wireless expense management as your wireless data traffic (and expenses) will go through the roof.
2. Creating only web based apps means you only need write and manage one set of code. Haven’t we heard this one before with Java?  Write once, deploy anywhere – right?  That promise was never delivered upon.  Furthermore, this is fundamentally a LCD approach….Least Common Denominator.  That means your application will quickly reach a ceiling where its capabilities will be limited because a feature will not be supported on one platform vs. another.  (Don’t kid yourself to think that mobile browsers are all the same – just look at the desktop WebKit browsers to see what I mean). This is the same principle as when you think about the fact that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  Furthermore, the flip side of creating mobile web apps is that you don’t get to leverage the underlying powers and unique points of any individual mobile platform.  Sure, there are solutions like BlackBerry WebWorks that allow you to write web applications that can leverage APIs for the operating system, but how is that materially different from a native application?  So back to LCD – your application will be limited, which means inevitably, your employees will be limited.  Is this what you want?  I’m guessing now.

So what are we to do?

For now, I say hold tight.  Personally, I like native applications on my mobile.  I’ve used some consumer grade services where they offered native apps on one platform and web apps on another.  I can tell you this.  The experience on the native application was captivating.  I used that application all the time.  The web based version?  It was just horrible and I don’t use it on this other device.  If you go the native app route, just make sure you have a mobile data security strategy.  Sure, that’s easier said than done, but it will pay off in my opinion as you and your organization continue to focus on the needs of your productive mobile workforce.