B S Nagarajan, director, Systems Engineering, VMware, India & SAARC

BYOD has gained significant traction in India, especially in the past two years. While we are seeing good traction for BYOD in India, we are also seeing a lot of challenges that CIOs face when implementing BYOD policies. Security and compliance issues, followed by the lack of comprehensive mobile device and information management tools, are creating headaches for CIOs in regulated sectors such as financial services. Virtualisation means we can run more than one instance of an OS, server or any other computing service in a single device.

More than half of enterprise and SMB organisations are looking to initiate BYOD programmes. Many IT departments are trying to figure out the best approach to manage all of these new end-points and protect corporate data. Virtualisation is one popular option, in this case. Earlier this year, we unveiled the VMware Horizon Suite, which is a comprehensive platform for workforce mobility that will connect end users to their data, applications and desktops on any device—without sacrificing IT security and control. The VMware Horizon Suite brings together VMware’s desktop virtualisation solution and technologies that the company has built from the ground up to support a mobile, collaborative workforce.

Nowadays, irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device—the corporation or the user—most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services). Given that the usage paradigms have changed, IT needs to rethink the security and manageability of mobile devices. IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device. It seems that the flexibility that end users desire is in direct conflict to the security and governance that corporate IT requires. VMware Horizon Workspace gives users a single interface where they can access the apps they need, securely delivered to them on the devices they want to use. If corporate IT is unable to supply a particular application on their device of choice, employees turn to external consumer solutions, which impacts security and governance. This new mobile paradigm is forcing IT leaders to face a daunting set of challenges. Not only must they provide multiple applications on multiple devices, but they must also ensure complete security and high availability.