Bursting at the seams with mobile devices

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

In the 90s I carried three devices – a laptop, a mobile phone and a pager. A pager you ask? Well the battery life on my mobile phone wasn’t great, and if you wanted to reach me right away you could page me. It was also in the era before texting, and the pager was the original one purpose texting device of choice.

In the Q1 2011 Mobile Workforce Report we found that the average mobile worker was carrying 2.68 devices for work. At the time, I thought that was a lot … But just last month we found that the number had expanded to 3.47 devices. We are bursting at the seams with mobile devices!

Do we really need three and a half devices to get our jobs done, or is it more to balance our lives? Today I have a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet. The laptop and smartphone are my core work devices; and the tablet is my “occasional” work device. I get to use it anytime I can pull it out of my kids’ hands. Sticky hands I should say … My mistake for letting them download Angry Birds.

But honestly, I can see three devices, but where are the extra .47 devices coming from? Here is the chart of what mobile workers reported:

How many of each mobile device do you personally use for work?
	2012	2011
Tablets	.54	0.27
Laptops/Notebooks	1.32	1.01
Smartphones	1.05	0.97
Mobile phones	.37	0.32
Netbooks/Ultra	.12	0.11
Other	.07
Average	3.47	2.68

It appears that the growth not only happened with tablets, but also on the laptop front. We think the dual laptop growth is because people need a larger laptop with a bigger monitor for the office; and a tiny laptop for travel. I personally hate traveling with a lot of heavy equipment.

It looks like the day ruled by “the one” device will never come, even with the arrival of all these fancy crave worthy devices. This trinity (quartet?) of Internet-capable devices is what we call the mobile stack. The new unit of computing includes the laptop, the smartphone, and now the tablet. The implications for enterprise IT departments are immediate: support needs have grown as many IT departments see employees using their own mobile devices to access secure documents and networks. Finance departments are also increasingly feeling the pain, with rising telecom costs on expense reports, from 3G roaming to expensive hotel Wi-Fi day passes, which often do not appear as budget line items.

Are you carrying a lot of mobile devices? Are you checking them at all hours of the day? We want to know. Take our Q2 Mobile Workforce survey, and you might even win yet another device… the new iPad.

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The iPad takes the Enterprise

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

We’ve been watching the data and have continued to find rapid adoption of the iPad among mobile workers. According to the most recent iPass Mobile Workforce Report 42 percent of mobile workers currently have an iPad and 34 percent use that iPad for at least some work.

 

Whether you provision your employees and iPad or not (most likely not since only 24 percent of mobile workers have a company issued iPad), there are iPads in the workplace accessing your network resources.

And this could cost you, since tablets consume an estimated five times more data than smartphones according to a March 2011 Mobile Future report. And the new iPad 4G LTE with its retina display is visually stunning and superfast, but will do a number on your employee’s data cap. Why? Because awesome visuals means bigger file sizes. And that extra spend will find its way into expense reports, even if you aren’t officially financing their iPad foray. You will need a cost-effective alternative to 3G and 4G for your iPad users.

Today’s iPad optimized version of iPass Open Mobile will give you a great alternative to 3G and 4G LTE with access to more than 700,000 Wi-Fi venues globally. It is available now on the iTunes AppStore.

But don’t neglect your own internal corporate Wi-Fi network. According to a recent study, by 2015, 80 percent of newly installed enterprise wireless networks will be obsolete due to initial installation of non-scalable technology. And without an effective plan for growth, enterprises deploying iPads today will need 300 percent more Wi-Fi by 2015 just to keep up with user demand.

More on the optimized iPass Open Mobile for iPad >>
Get iPass Open Mobile for your iPad and take advantage of 700,000 Wi-Fi hotspots (or 3G/4G) >>

 

 

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Lost Or Stolen Smartphone? What Do You Do?

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

Several years ago, a colleague of mine had her smartphone stolen out of her room in Las Vegas. It didn’t stay in Vegas, in fact it was recovered by hotel security three days later – a hotel maid was dealing in stolen phones. But by that time she had already contacted IT, and a replacement smartphone was on its way.

Ah the days of corporate provisioned smartphones.

In the era of “Bring Your Own Device,” it is hard to know what to do when your personally-owned smartphone is lost or stolen. And this happens more than you may think, in fact in the Q4 iPass Mobile Workforce Report we found that 16 percent of mobile employees have had a smartphone lost or stolen.

So what do you do? To answer that question I sat down with our resident security guru Chris Witeck.

If it is a personally owned device he recommends that you contact your carrier right away, and if it has any business data on it (including email) then call your IT help desk as well. Your IT help desk may be able to remote wipe your phone, or disable your Microsoft Exchange account so that thieves won’t be able to break in. And if you recover your smartphone later hidden between the seats of your car, your wiped data can be easily recovered.

Time is of the essence though. Chris told me that many criminals will take the battery out to prevent remote wipe, and use a room without mobile access to break into the phone. When you consider all of the valuable information that you may store on your smartphone, like credit card information and passwords – it is important to act fast.

However, the first time we think about our smartphone security shouldn’t be after an incident. Chris recommends that you be prepared.

For IT:

1. Enforce a strong password policy, and make sure your employees can’t leave their smartphones unlocked.
2. Consider two-factor authentication, something the user knows combined with something the user has like a USB token or a smartcard.
3. Ensure corporate data is encrypted.
4. Enable device wipe capabilities whether it is a company-provisioned device or a personally-owned device.

For the user:

1. Password protect your device, and make sure that it locks after five to 10 minutes.
2. Password protect your password note page.  With so much data and access in the cloud, I know I have more passwords than I can remember. Chris told me that many people use their notes program on their smartphone to store passwords. If you are going to do this, you should password protect the note. Simple enough.
3. Invest in a “find a device” tool like the find my iPhone tool part of iCloud, or third party tools such as Whereismycellphone, BlueRetriever, Lookout or iTag. That way you can determine if your device was stolen, or just lost.
4. Respond quickly when your device goes missing.

 

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iPass Mobile Network grows coverage in European Conference Centers

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

Conference season is already upon us and between now and June, crowds of business travelers will gather at major conference centers worldwide.

To ensure iPass customers can get connected at more places, we’ve extended our partnership with iBahn, one of our global hospitality technology partners.

While the summer interrupts the conference season, part two of the conference season kicks off in September as budgets need to be spent and products purchased. As our blog yesterday illuminated, the iPass Mobile Network is continuing to grow rapidly including coverage in more conference facilities. So if you plan to visit any of the following hotels in Europe, you can seamlessly logon if you’re with iPass thanks to our iBahn partnership.

A few of the choices in London are: Grosvenor House JW Marriott, Hilton London Metropole, The Dorchester on Park Lane (and you can always eat at the Grill) or in Paris, just 10 minutes’ walk from the Champs-Élysées is the Hilton Paris Arc De Triomphe, or the Marriott Rive Gauche.

In Berlin there’s always the Marriott Berlin close to the historic Brandenburg Gate and Check Point Charlie or if you’re in Amsterdam you can always stay at the Marriott Amsterdam, just across from the across from the Leidseplein square in central Amsterdam

 

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Who will have the bigger IT budget?

Thursday, January 19th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

In enterprise software the concept of “departmental” used to be a dirty word. 

Product marketers would address a competitor’s offering as “just” departmental – translated as “niche” and “unable to scale.” But with the advent of mass adoption of consumer devices, the proliferation of the mobile Internet and the rise of cloud services, departmental is the next big thing.

At least that is one of Gartner Group’s predictions for 2012 as business managers are expected to increasingly take control of the IT budget.

“The Gartner Predicts 2012 special report addresses the continuing trend toward the reduction of control IT has over the forces that affect it. As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the past few years. Moving forward, IT departments will find that they must coordinate activities in a much wider scope than they once controlled.”

This is aligned with some trends we’re seeing in enterprise mobility:

• IT professionals feel they were losing control of the mobile landscape: 41 percent of IT managers believed they had less control over their employees’ choice of devices than a year ago, and 37 percent felt it was about the same.
• As a result, Mobile device liability is shifting to the user: The mix of corporate-provisioned versus individually-liable has shifted. Today 58 percent of companies provision smartphones to their employees; this is down from nearly two-thirds a year ago. 42 percent of employees have individually-liable smartphones – they purchase and pay for their own devices.
• Employees are more tech savvy, and less reliant on IT: Most mobile workers described themselves as highly proficient when it comes to technology (69 percent), compared to six percent who rated themselves as fairly proficient or non-proficient. And mobile workers only contacted IT as a last resort (81 percent), while two percent had IT on speed dial.
• Yet “support” in general is the hot button for IT: This is likely the result of the difficulty in “hitting a moving target” — as lifecycles of each model of a mobile device are measured in months, not years. The highest level of frustration was in providing support for non-provisioned devices, followed by onboarding and ongoing support for these devices.
• And according to IT professionals, employees are contacting IT with more demanding tech support issues (especially since mobile employees are only going to IT as a last resort). 45 percent of IT departments stated that the IT problems were more complex than two years ago, while 27 percent found them the same, and only seven percent believed the issues were less complex than two years ago.

The shift is well underway, but for IT management we think this change represents opportunity.

Have a perspective? We have our Q1 Mobile Workforce Survey underway and we would like to hear from you. This quarter we are looking at Wi-Fi adoption, the social enterprise and multi-tasking.

And if you take our survey you will be entered into a drawling to win an iPad 2.

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