The Next Big Challenge

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

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Consider this: There are more cell phones in use today than there are notebooks. Personal media players and portable gaming devices are joining a burgeoning list of devices with large screens, wireless connectivity, storage and processing capability. Chances are that if you check out the daily accouterment of any average PC user, you are likely to find more than one of these devices on him. And chances are that he is using them also to atleast store some other files.

In my view, the next big challenge for IT professionals is going to be these devices; how to extend your applications to them, how to integrate them into existing networks, how to secure data on them and so on. Adding to the challenge will be the quicker replacement cycles. A notebook or a PC was good for about three years. Cellphones are being replaced in six months! And the chances of device loss are much higher!

Krishna Kumar, Editor

Let us take these scenarios one by one.

As users turn more mobile, it is only natural that they would not just like to, but probably need to access various applications on their devices. Do you know how many different Operating Systems are run on just cell phones? How will you get your applications to run on all of them? You will use and embedded browser? Great. What about media players?

How will you synchronize data on these devices with that residing on your network storage devices? What about tracking e-mail sent out from them? Have you wargamed the scenario where data is stolen by copying out to flash cards?

Yet another headache will be data security. Consider the new mp3 player that your director has just acquired. How will you secure the data that he now prefers to copy on to it for backup?

What happens to the data when one of these devices go for repair?

As I write this, I know that most IT strategists and managers are not yet greatly concerned about these issues. Many of you know that the situation exists, but are ignoring it as nothing catastrophic has happened. Perhaps many more are not even aware of the extent to which such devices have
already penetrated the networks.

The answer, unlike that classic, is not yet blowing in the winds; at least not yet.

Technologies have to mature and platforms have to stabilize before standard procedures can be evolved for handling this scenario. Till then we will have to improvise on how to deal with it; what to allow what not to-what to support and what to avoid. Till then, answers will have to be situation and even person specific.

But, given the proliferation of devices with compute capability, there is no doubting the big challenge before us - the integration and management of these devices into the mainstream of computing, and having them coexist with or even replace traditional PCs and notebooks.

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