Embrace the BYOD Future with Mobile Cloud Computing Applications

Increasingly employers have come to expect that their employees will be able to maintain access to critical business intelligence 24/7. This is coming more into reach as a growing number of both employees and employers are embracing the Bring Your Own Device trend in the workplace. Approximately 140 million smartphones and tablets are expected to be brought in to companies this year, and a full 60% of businesses are endorsing their own BYOD strategy.[i] Additionally, 19% of businesses even have their own app stores as a part of their BYOD strategy.[ii] The BYOD trend poses numerous challenges, however, which is one of the reasons that many businesses were delaying putting a legitimate strategy in place for dealing with the trend, even as many of their employers were happily working with sensitive business data on their mobile devices anyway.

Ignoring the problems posed by the BYOD won’t make them go away. As I had written earlier, a full 70% of workers who bring their own device to work do so without approval from their IT department.[iii] The time has come to face the challenges posed by the trend, including:

  • a multiplicity of devices (Android, Apple, and Windows tablets and smartphones, etc.)
  • a multiplicity of operating systems for those devices
  • a diverse array of applications employed
  • a diverse number of capabilities utilized by those deploying their own mobile devices at work
  • concerns about the security of business data transmitted to and from these devices

Hybrid Mobile Applications and the Cloud

Each IT department will need to assess for itself which devices they find to be acceptable as a part of their BYOD strategy, but the rise of cloud computing may make restrictions on the type of hardware to be allowed by IT departments obsolete. New advances in coding for the web, including the adoption of HTML5 and CSS3, are increasingly making it more attractive for organizations to generate web-based business applications to meet their collaboration, information sharing, and productivity needs. The advantage of keeping an application online is that any browser-equipped smartphone or tablet will be able to utilize the productivity tools of that application, allowing businesses to bypass any concerns they might have as to which mobile device platform they would be creating their business apps for. Additionally, moving the computations of a given program to the cloud will help to compensate for mobile devices that still lag behind laptops and desktops in terms of their power and speed.

There are even positive developments in the one area cloud-based web apps tend to be trusted the least: security. Organizations can use multiple cloud protection engines running security programs simultaneously, coupled with software agents implemented on the mobile devices that interact with the cloud.[iv] These cloud-based web apps then can constantly monitor the status of a mobile device attempting to communicate with it, rejecting any devices that demonstrate evidence of infection by malware.[v] As cloud computing becomes increasingly cheaper and more secure, the reasons to adopt it as a part of an organization’s overall BYOD strategy become more and more obvious.

Furthermore, businesses can couple this cloud-based computing with their own hybrid mobile apps, which coordinate web-based applications with a custom “shell” application that allows users to employ the unique features of their specific device. The application is then fully optimized for the user interface of that device’s display and controls. This allows for the bulk of the programming to be done within a web-based environment, making it much easier to update from one central location in the future to reflect changing business processes. This combination of efficiency in scalability, along with easy optimization for a variety of multiple devices, will make cloud-based solutions more and more attractive to businesses. Indeed, deploying cloud-based, mobile-optimized hybrid business applications may very well prove to be the key to putting an effective BYOD strategy in place.

DDA Apps has been developing a wide variety of online and mobile applications for businesses and healthcare organizations for years. With so much of its business coming from the healthcare industry, DDA Apps is quite familiar with even the most sensitive of security concerns. DDA Apps also boasts an incredible degree of capabilities thanks to its diverse staff of writers, graphic artists, illustrators, animators, videographers, IT specialists, and programmers, so DDA is always prepared to take on even the most comprehensive and innovative new projects. With extensive experience designing, programming, and developing for multiple operating systems and devices in all the top programming languages, DDA Apps has the skills to translate your business app needs for optimum performance on any mobile device. Contact DDA Apps when you want to discover how you can lead your workforce effectively into the future of mobile computing.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/werkunz/3680331543 Werner Kunz via http://photopin.com  Creative Commons info: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/



[i] Claybrook, Bill. “Mobile cloud trends: Apps let enterprises handle the risks of cloud computing.” November 2012. SearchCloudApplications.com. TechTarget. February 13, 2013. http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/feature/Mobile-cloud-trends-Apps-let-enterprises-handle-the-risks-of-cloud-computing

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Drinkwater, Doug. “Smartphones, tablets and BYOD are forcing enterprises to improve mobile security: study.” October 10, 2012. TabTimes.  January 31, 2013. http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2012/10/10/smartphones-tablets-and-byod-are-forcing-enterprises-improve

[iv] Claybrook, Bill. “Mobile cloud trends.”

[v] Ibid.