OREANDA-NEWS. December 16, 2011. I.T. Co. makes public the first survey of enterprise mobility in Russia. The results confirm the great attention to mobile technologies is caused by organizations requirements for communication and business processes improvement.  The reality is that mobile access to business data is required for many employees.

The Center for Enterprise Mobility of I.T. Co., provider of the full range of solutions and services transforming mobile devices into multifunctional business tools, conducted a study of business and IT decision-makers to examine the current state, trends and perspective for enterprise mobility in Russia. The survey was executed through questionnaire method, run among attendees of Enterprise Mobility Day 2011 conference (hosted by the Center for Enterprise Mobility, I.T. Co.). The conference was attended by more than 150 IT and business leaders representing medium and large organizations from different industries. The survey results are based on 102 accepted questionnaires with more than 75% of the completed questions. It allowed getting the exact and integral picture of the analyzed area. Respondents were suggested to answer 20 comprehensive questions to analyze the following aspects of the use of smartphones and tablets within business environment:

General view of enterprise mobility – demand, incentive, state, plans

Users and mobile access to corporate information systems and resources

 Providing employees with mobile devices and access tool to enterprise information resources and systems

Factors that limit effective use of mobile devices

BYOD – employee-owned devices within enterprise environment

Scenarios for the deployment of corporate mobile apps

Mobile platforms

Survey results confirm demand to consumer smartphones and tablets within business environment. That is not just a trend to have and use popular gadgets, firstly adapted for business by top management, but the result of organizations requirements in terms of improving communication (81%) as well as existing business processes (61%).

Mobile access to the enterprise systems and resources is most required but not limited by management (83%) and head of departments (81%). There is a clear tendency in Russia to forming the category of mobile professionals (i.e. in accordance to IDC Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009-2013 Forecast). Mobile professionals are employees who have to work most part of their time out of workplace and these employees require fully functional, timely and secure mobile access to corporate resources.

Results demonstrate that organizations take into their accounts not only smartphones but tablets as well. iOS and Android dominate both smartphones and tablets OS. And if iPad has been the only one choice for business users not long ago, then today there is a tendency to growth of Android tablets market share (23% of respondents marked) and which are under consideration to be used by a half of examined organizations.

Variety of gadgets and platforms, while lack of the updated corporate standards, is the most popular reason to limit efficient use of mobile devices (50%). More than 40% of respondents marked information security restrictions as a barrier to effective use of mobile devices within business environment.  Only less than one fifth of the respondents indicated cost of devices as a key limiting factor hold 6-7 points of the survey together with unavailability of IT/network infrastructure reason.

Only 4-5% of respondents specify implementation of mobile device management solutions (MDM) by their organizations.  Deployment of such tools can have a significant impact on providing legitimacy and clear control of mobile access to corporate information resources and systems within the existing corporate policies and regulations. More than 65% of respondents are aware of the necessity in these solutions and consider or have plans to deploy appropriate tools within the nearest future.

“If resume survey results, we can say that subject of employees mobilization has attracted a great attention from IT side as well as from business, who in most cases initiates such requests towards IT and information security,” said Sergey Orlik, Director of Center for Enterprise Mobility by I.T. Co. “It requires system approach to implement both processes and solutions to mobilize employees and business processes. This is the only way to efficient settle matters of rapid and secure mobile access to corporate data.”