Inevitable Computing Changes In The Enterprise

We may be witnessing a massive change in the enterprise IT space, fueled by the evolution of personal computing. The days of companies spending a lot of its funding in purchasing physical servers, maintenance, energy and the labor cost of running it 24/7 with regular hardware refresh cycle are fast becoming outdated. Yes, there is no such thing as serverless computing per se, somewhere in the chain of Internet-connected computing, a machine dedicated for serving clients (PCs, smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices) will always exist.

Companies have to opportunity to cut-cost of enterprise computing through:

1. BYOD

Byod was established not by rank-and-file employees themselves, but also the leadership team members of firms. It is very convenient to use devices you own, compared to their corporate locked-down counterparts. This is also true even for the IT teams that are tasked to enforce corporate IT policies and issue company equipment to employees, they themselves use their personal mobile phones for work.

As companies will always have people deciding for themselves to implement informal BYOD, it cannot be ignored, many companies are embracing it and formulate policies that mitigate potential problems instead of outright banning BYOD in the office entirely. The entry of IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices to the corporate and the enterprise environments add more spice to an already complicated situation of BYOD trend. IT teams have more things to monitor (for security, privacy, and integrity) aside from the legacy server hardware housekeeping.

2. Convenience provided by cloud-services vendors

The availability of cloud-services is both a boon and bane of corporate IT teams. It is a boon because it requires a lot of expertise (and frequent study required to update one’s knowledge) to host a corporate computing service inside the organization itself. The huge cost of server hardware, the licensing of the operating system and the application software on top of it. Even one of the most fundamental communication tool, corporate email, is very tricky to set up using Microsoft Exchange, there is open source alternative, which also requires similar if a not deeper understanding of hardware than the former.

Cloud-services are a game changer, given all the responsibility of hardware, network delivery and performance are outsourced to a 3rd party vendor. Definitely, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other Tech giants can service their hardware much more flexible than a typical company hosting their internal computing services. The bane of this is the less need for system administrators inside company premises. Other companies that wish to further cut the cost even opt for signing-up for MSP (Managed Service Provider), contractors that perform what a directly hired system administrator does in the enterprise, for a specific service package, a certain level of SLA (Service Level Agreement) is negotiated in order to meet client requirement.

With a careful mix of BYOD and cloud-services, companies can save a lot of money which can be funneled back to the organization to establish a credible cybersecurity defense posture. This includes training employees with cybersecurity, and if the funding can afford it the establishment of regular penetration testing against the corporate network and all its hosted computing devices is reasonable. For authentication, it is very much cheaper to implement 2-FA (Two-factor authentication) devices which will supplement the typical usernames and passwords than the company becoming a victim of a data breach or cyber attack due to stolen user credential.

BYOD and cloud-services are not the silver bullets for convenience in the enterprise computing space, they are just instruments for a more productive workforce. As such, no company should be at a standstill of not implementing a reasonable level of security precautions and policies.