Research In Motion today announced that its new Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, is now available for download. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 re-invents RIM’s EMM by bringing together device management, industry leading security, and mobile applications management for BlackBerry smartphones (including the new BB10 models) in a consolidated solution. It also provides a single console for managing BlackBerry, Android and Apple iOS devices.

“BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 empowers employees to be more productive and better equipped to serve customers while it provides business and IT leaders with the confidence that corporate data is protected and manageable in the same way they have long enjoyed with BlackBerry,” said Peter Devenyi, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Software, Research In Motion. “BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 makes mobility easy for businesses to help keep them moving.”

Flexible Enterprise Mobility Management (more…)

The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) trend has taken root in South Africa, with workers increasingly relying on their personally-owned smartphones, tablets and computers in their day to day work rather than on  devices issued to them by their companies.

This trend – known as consumerisation of IT – has brought with it tremendous opportunities, but also massive risks for companies with mobile workforces, says Alexandra Zagury, Managing Director for South & Southern Africa at Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry® solution.

She says that many employees in the average enterprise are now relying on personally owned smartphones and tablet computers to carry out work tasks that range from authorising payments to signing off purchase orders and editing sensitive documents.

“Compared to the top-down nature of technology deployment in enterprises in the past, we are today seeing employees are bringing their own productivity-boosting devices and services to work with them,” says Zagury. “This trend towards consumerisation is being driven by the advent of devices such as smartphones that allow people to seamlessly access personal and work services wherever they are.”

This brings gains in productivity, efficiency and worker satisfaction, but also creates obvious compliance risks over sensitive data. Some companies might try to react to the threats and risks by locking the devices down to prevent use of unauthorised applications, websites and social networking capabilities. (more…)

This post has been written by Brian Flora, a writer and a self profound tech geek, who specializes in data storage that includes cloud computing and flash arrays. This is what he has to say about the best practices for storage provisioning in enterprise application deployment.

Considering that data within each enterprise is expected to grow aggressively both dimensionally and in complexity, it’s essential that data storage provisioning be managed equally aggressively. As a matter of fact, Express Computer posts that by taking advantage of things like de-duplication, automated tiering/cataloging, and virtualization, IT architects can reduce storage provisioning time demands by 50 percent and overall costs by 20 percent.

Exactly what is storage provisioning? It’s the often tedious and complicated process of partitioning/organizing data storage needs using server disk drive space (arranged in order using logical unit numbers or LUNs) in order to improve the efficiency/security/cost effectiveness of a storage area network (SAN). If said data requires interaction between different hosts and are comprised within clusters (as is often the case when data is diversified, stratified and utilized across multiple platforms), this process can become burdensome.

To arrive at a good storage provisioning enterprise deployment plan, consider these best practices: (more…)

This great infographic was done by Unisys to demonstrate the current landscape of consumerization of IT, and how Enterprise IT departments plan to keep up. Out of the survey it is found that most IT department are completely out of touch with how “iWorkers” prefer to work, and is completely unprepared for it. What is pretty interesting is that most respondents claimed to buy their choice of device themselves – this is in stark contrast to the IT department of yesteryear where users had a limited catalogue of hardware, and those hardware devices were the only supported way to access your work resources.

Modern workers prefer using their own devices, and expect IT to support this. In a way IT departments have to shift to a device independent services offering – which might not sound too difficult in smaller businesses, but in large business it is a monumental task. So I have a few issues with this infographic:

• When they refer to “modernized” customer facing applications – are they referring to actual applications running on the phone? This is strange, because smarter organizations these days tend to focus on device independent web interfaces. Using modern HTML5 methods, these web sites can be very high quality.
• “IT is doing less to secure mobile devices” – There is one major reason for this. Modern mobile device management software has a major flaw – they can do not support all modern mobile devices on the same level. On certain platforms this is an overly manual process of sending config files to devices. Blackberry has brilliant enterprise management. iOS – not so much. Once all the new smartphone platforms start seeing enterprise management as a priority (which happens little by little with each release), this will improve. My issue here is probably rather with Apple – Android has been playing along more with MDM solutions like Afaria. Apple compatible MDM tends to rely on silly apps in order to communicate with MDM servers. Microsoft is however also looking to support more mobile platforms in future versions of SCCM. But we have to wait for Tech Ed to see how that pans out.

At the end of the day it is important to remember that infograhics these days are primarily used to market a service – so some statements have to be taken in context for whom the infographic is made. Otherwise this infographic is pretty spot on – and a harsh wake up call to IT departments… (It is pretty big, so you have to see it after the break) (more…)

Zenoss recently released its annual Open Source Management Survey, and the results are quite surprising. It turns out that over time OSS is slowly being adopted in the enterprise. While the line “98% of Enterprises use Open Source” sounds impressive, you have to take into account that it doesnt mention where these OSS deployments are used. My bet is that most of these deployments are on a few select servers – desktop users in the enterprise tend to still stick to Windows.

One shift is perhaps the use OSS mobile devices – Android to be specific – and enterprises are scrambling to be ready for the onslought of these gadgets, be it mobile phones or future slates.