Cost and Security - Top Reasons for Enterprises Not Rushing Towards Mobility

A recently held survey has revealed that IT managers and CIOs, despite realizing the benefits of enterprise mobility and willing for adoption, are reluctant from taking this step. The main reasons cited by them were security that keeps arising repeatedly and cost that is very high most of the times. This survey was conducted by a well-known company that provides mobility related security solutions to the enterprises.

Around 300 IT decision makers and CIOs from the US and UK were surveyed and most of them said that they are getting unremitting requests and pressure from employee's to adopt mobility culture. That said that their employees want extended and simplified access to the corporate server and the stored data even from a remote location and they support this demand with a point that it could increase their productivity level. This is possible only through enterprise mobile apps as they allow users to stay connected with the corporate server through their personal smart devices. Thirty-six percent respondents said that there is nothing wrong in employees demanding enterprise apps and saying that they would increase productivity. However, they add that increase in productivity is only possible by strategic planning and deciding the functions to include in that enterprise app.

Any very shocking revelation in this survey was about the number of apps owned by the company. On an average, every company had around 400 custom or packaged apps used within the organization. More than ninety-one percent respondents said that they either have taken steps to develop company-owned mobile apps or are planning to do this in near future. Only 22 percent said that they have apps that can be accessed by smart devices without any restriction being imposed by the company.

In reply to the question about why they have reduced their app deployment speed, 65 percent CIOs and IT heads blamed cost incurred in the deployment of enterprise mobile apps for making them halt their app deployment process.  Around 63 percent said that they have not stopped but slowed it down because of the security concerns. They said that they want to review every aspect of enterprise mobile apps' security before deploying them, which slows down the app development process. Around 48 percent said that they are still thinking about deploying apps in their offices because of the cost of support and maintenance. This made surveyors conduct another survey to get a better understanding of the challenges faced by businesses. The outcome of this survey was very close to what this company had anticipated. A surprising factor according to surveyors was the number of employees wanting enterprise mobile apps. Surveyors said that this number was even greater than what they thought it would be. Most CIOs said that cost factor tops the list of factors not allowing them to adopt mobility because their budget is also not increasing. This means that they cannot implement enterprise mobility because they don’t have capital for setting up the infrastructure, hiring up employees to take care of the set-up.

This was clearly reflected in the first survey that I cited above. Thirty-two percent respondents said that they are capable of building enterprise mobile apps and 47 business owners said that they would have to hire an app development company to get their apps built. The reason cited behind this was the non-availability of time, resources and skills.