Users get choosy about big data and BYOD

Selling mobility projects may become easier as customers and partners begin to assess their specific needs and strategy. Fleur Doidge reports

IT support specialist Networks First's latest end-user event hinted at the path end-user demand will take as the mobility, big data and BYOD trends become further embedded in business and in industry practice. That is according to Peter Titmus, chairman at Networks First, speaking exclusively to ChannelWeb this week.

Titmus said that the services provider is reaping rewards from smaller, tightly focused industry events that attract both resellers and end-user prospects. Its latest two events, in Birmingham and at the Institute of Directors in London, gave customers and partners a chance to air views on their pain points around consumer-device driven mobility.

"We got a mixture of partners and resellers coming along and having communication, and the topic was BYOD. Our take is less about mobile device management (MDM) than trying to differentiate between information and data and the securing of the information," he said.

"Rather than managing a lot of data on those devices, I think people are starting to catch on - people are pushing back from the user communications about dictatorial systems implemented on their own devices."

Titmus indicated that it seems that many users remain reluctant to give over too much of the management of the data on their personal devices to restrictive corporate systems. One way around that, which more customers and partners appear to be favouring, is to manage only the information that is pertinent to the company, rather than the whole device perhaps.

This tallies with the forecast offered by speakers at the Ovum BYOX World Forum last week. As reported by ChannelWeb, Stephan Conaway, chief information officer at Brent Council, said the north London local authority has been reviewing the assumption that all data must necessarily be kept secure.

"We are trying to move away from being Fortress Us. Some [of our data] is in the cloud, the rest of it [is] out there somewhere, and the government is happy with that," Conaway told a panel at the event. Security instead should focus on which specifics need protection, and which data is relatively low risk, for whatever reason.

Titmus agreed with the general thrust of that notion. "From a practical perspective, end users are trying to find ways around these things already, and only providing information on the device that someone needs," he said.

An example, he suggested, might be cashflow data. Most companies run some sort of cashflow analysis, and information from that comes from all sorts of sources, including financial databases and quote engines. However, all the company may really care about is what cash is needed for the next 13 weeks or so.

But what about future-proofing?

Data not needed now may nevertheless be valuable information down the track. Of course that is something each customer and its provider needs to think about as well, Titmus agreed, but the point is that all these elements should be weighed more carefully before wading in to secure and store everything that passes through the network.

Meanwhile, the opportunities around mobility and BYOD are growing, if the Networks First events - where about 25 invited prospects were in attendance at each event - have been any guide. After the first 10 to 15 minutes of talking about the related opportunities, says Titmus (pictured, right), "the light tends to go on" and by the end of the event, pretty much every company had a number of ideas of ways mobility and BYOD could benefit them.

Even if there is no obvious and direct ROI beyond productivity benefits, many end users feel mobility can indeed enable significant savings across other areas - perhaps in office real estate, for example.

And the benefits are starting to be understood and could be applied across the whole spectrum of verticals from healthcare to financial services, and across public and private sector organisations, Titmus reported.

"The feedback from these events has been really good. They are not massive events, yet we made about 10 appointments. People are really interested in what is going on," he said. "Really, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and the number of mobile devices is going skywards."