CEO Blogs

In my last post, I discussed the gap between business units that enthusiastically embrace BYOD and IT departments, where BYOD is regarded with more hesitation.

Yet it’s clear: BYOD is not only here to stay, it is quickly becoming a dominant force that IT departments must deal with. And in most circumstances “just say no” isn’t an option; BYOD offers employees too many rich opportunities to boost productivity, innovation, and collaboration.

So what’s an IT department — your IT department — to do?

What’s the state of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in your organization?

When I ask this of our customers I get replies aligning with industry research and other anecdotal evidence pointing to what I call the BYOD gap.

Business units are adopting BYOD – along with mobile apps and consumer-grade cloud services – pretty much as fast as they can, but too often such adoption is unsanctioned by their IT departments; there is no BYOD policy.
In the shadows
It’s a sizable gap, too: by some reports , almost 90% of employees use their own devices at work – but only about 40% of enterprises have committed to implementing BYOD policies, procedures, and infrastructure.

This is classic Shadow IT, and it’s on a scale unlike anything since the 1980s when corporate business units defied their IT departments to acquire PCs. It took mainframe-obsessed IT staff a good long time to grasp that forbidding PCs was a supreme waste of time, because whenever business unit managers find tools enabling them to boost productivity and achieve better results, they are enthusiastically embraced whether IT likes it or not. 

In my last post, I shared some sobering numbers from a recent study by the DRP Council on how well – and not well – organizations recover from disruptions. Many of the problems revealed in the study can, I believe, be attributed to four causes:

Inadequate recovery plans that don’t anticipate the types of events that actually occur
Insufficient plan documentation and lack of compliance reporting
Not nearly enough recovery plan testing
Failing the recovery tests that do occur

All of this is eminently understandable – it’s hard to focus budget and time on what we prefer to regard as unlikely possibilities.

So here’s my first recovery best practice: think of your recovery plan as the best way to keep those possibilities unlikely, because when they do happen, they cost plenty.

Online presence has never been more important to your business – but behind it lurks immense technical complexity. The sort of complexity that produces things like software, network and power failures, and human error.

So, of course, it’s prudent to prepare ways to recover from such failures, mistakes and vagaries of nature, which is why so many organizations – a majority, according to a recent study by the DRP Council – deploy some sort of secondary recovery site. Though, less than 10% use cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) .

We can’t afford to ignore the myriad of mobile devices and apps currently saturating our attention and wireless connections.

In my last post, I laid out some of the industry’s eye-popping numbers. This time, I’m offering up just one graphic (from Cisco’s recent Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update ) showing why you must upgrade your network infrastructure. Pronto.

Wireless chatter really is everywhere: I recently saw an ad from a major pain relief company touting the benefits of its latest product, a “wireless” pain patch

But wireless implementations can be plenty painful, and there’s no magic patch to ease the strain.

When clients ask us the best way to ensure that a wireless service performs as desired, we advise them to begin by asking — in non-technical terms — what they’re trying to accomplish.