Redefine mobile data management, strike the right balance

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If IT is to match the expectations of users and gain a productivity boost promised by mobility, it's important for organisations to move beyond traditional storage practices and adopt more user-centric approaches. This entails the same experience from your organisation that they receive from mobile devices and the consumer clouds that come with them, with regard to data access and sharing.

It's now commonplace in most organisations for more data to exist on mobile devices than in data centres. There is also pressure to tighten security and governance on mobile data while users want more access made easier. IT support for data on mobile devices usually only extends to basic backup for laptops with little or no provision made for smartphones and tablets. If you're collecting data on your laptop then you could do more with it and maybe there's more reason to invest in managing mobile data?

Data management is giving everyone a headache

Failure to manage data on mobile devices causes significant risk and related cost issues while stifling productivity. Users can be relied on to find ways to circumvent anything they don't like when it comes to the IT department. If users are told not to use private cloud storage but are not compelled to stop, or offered an equally effective option by IT, they will continue to use it.

Part of the problem is that neither side of the mobility and public cloud equation (users and IT) is looking at the issue from each other's perspective.

Tough questions don't always require hard answers

How do organisations deliver a data management strategy that suits users and IT in the mobility landscape? They need to redefine data management and give data mobility the weight of consideration it deserves. A number of questions must be answered:

• What data is on mobile devices?
• What importance does the data carry?
• Where is the data being stored?
• How is it used?
• What are the risks associated with the data?

It's remarkable how often chief information officers (CIOs) avoid these questions because they feel they could be too difficult to address. However, businesses don't have to invade staff privacy to arrive at a more effective data management regime. They can provide the controls required to improve security, risk and productivity without antagonising employees.

For those who refuse to acknowledge there is an issue, they need to realise that pretending Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) isn't happening and isn't widespread, is not an acceptable excuse for inaction. It's commonplace for teams to share data in open public cloud folders and there are many real-life examples of companies falling foul of this.

Striking the right balance for everyone

It is possible for organisations to mitigate all of these challenges and provide the productivity tools that users are happy with. The wide availability of fast networks and modern deduplication technologies mean that collecting data from user's laptops isn't intrusive or the storage challenge it used to be, and once back to your data centre, you can start to do things with the data that works in everyone's favour.

Once user data comes under control again, you can then enable secure, in-house sync and share features, keeping files synchronised and accessible on all their mobile devices, so employees have what they need, when they need it. File sharing inside or outside the organisation becomes simple for users whatever device they are using and it can be managed, with access properly controlled and made secure. The regular collection from user's devices effectively becomes a backup, keeping them productive even if the worst happens, all with the security of remote wipe for lost or stolen devices.

Then there is the matter of governance - if there's a chance the data on mobile devices affects the company's compliance status. As the mobile workforce continues to grow and more data gets generated outside the data centre, bringing endpoint data into a searchable dataset for governance, compliance or legal reasons becomes critical.

This does raise privacy concerns for organisations and they need to be completely transparent about what is collected and how it is used; there needs to be a privacy charter created for employees. The good news is that this isn't as hard as it seems and, with the right technology, corporate actions can be audited for transparency.

It may not be apparent to organisations and users that mobility can introduce significant risks to their established data management regimes. However, if businesses want to ensure they are ready to flourish in the much-altered landscape ushered in by combined mobility and cloud functions, they need to look for solutions that enable them to access and use data no matter where it resides.