Half of businesses not yet mobile

A global survey commissioned by Citrix across Europe has revealed that even though 80% of large enterprises believe mobile to be the greatest factor in organisational competitiveness, 41% still lack a formal mobile strategy.

Commissioned to produce a snapshot of mobility across the globe, The Citrix ‚”Mobility in Business’ report polled a total of 1,700 senior IT decision-makers across 17 countries. Respondents were asked about the advantages and challenges of implementing mobile initiatives, their current policies toward mobile devices and the impact the consumerisation of IT is having on their businesses.

Barriers to Mobility

Across the BRICs countries, organisations reported an average of three main barriers preventing formal support for mobile initiatives. The most common obstacles faced by businesses included a lack in the ability to support multiple mobile applications (40%), unfit legacy systems (36.25%) and the lack of a strategy in how employees should best implement mobility (35.5%).

Other notable findings related to the challenges and advantages of implementing mobility include:

· China and Brazil placed the greatest importance on mobility, with 60% and 52% of organisations, respectively, naming it as their number one business priority.

· Although 41% of BRICs countries admit to being without a formal mobile strategy, 12.5% expect to have one in place within a year.

· Increasing development of mobile apps and increasing adoption of secure file sharing and collaboration tools are the top two mobile initiatives for business. Improving network performance and access is the third most important mobile initiative.

· 60 percent of organisations say they are changing management processes to better manage those working on any device from anywhere.

· Organisations are most focused on measuring the impact that mobility has on productivity and employee motivation.

Unidentified Devices – Enemies at the Gate:

According to the report, 55% of BRICs organisations are concerned about the number of unidentified computing devices accessing their business network. This refers to desktops, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, ultrabooks, smartphones and tablets which are not provisioned by an IT department and are therefore unknown. Worldwide, organisations report an average of 425 such connections every day, with the highest figures from businesses in Brazil (994), Canada (649) and Japan (618).

Other findings around unidentified devices include:

· 75 percent of US organisations are concerned about the number of unidentified devices accessing their business network every day, nearly 20% more than the global average.

· Organisations estimate that employees connect an average of four computing devices to corporate IT networks every day. The highest such estimate is in India (six devices per employee), while the lowest are in the UK and Taiwan (three devices per employee).

The Rise of the Open Source Enterprise

The research also reveals that an increasing number of enterprises around the world are embracing open source platforms. Android was by far the most popular mobile platform according to respondents in the BRICs countries, with 80% saying they supported or were planning to support it. The second and third most popular were Windows 8 (65%) and Apple iOS (45%). The BlackBerry platform received support from 26% of respondents. Looking at the adoption of such platforms, 81% of respondents reported an increase in the use of Android within their organization, followed by Windows 8 (57%), Apple iOS (51%), Windows Mobile (37%) and BlackBerry (19%).

Mobility and Application Concerns

The survey findings also reveal the impact that consumer-orientated technologies continue to have on the workplace. According to the report, 27% of the BRICs workforce is now believed to be using their own mobile apps for work purposes. This raises a number of different concerns for businesses, such as the security of the app being used (54%), how secure the app store or purchase platform of the app is (47%) and maintaining data privacy mandates (44%).

Findings around mobile applications also included:

· Globally, the most popular mobile apps being demanded by employees were sales, CRM or database related, with 48% reporting such a trend.

· Other popular apps were sales, CRM and database apps (51%), intranet portals (56%), messaging applications (52%) and file sync and sharing platforms (46%).

· More than half (63%) of the BRICs countries organisations surveyed said that the acquisition of mobile apps would be a mixture of in-house development and off-the-shelf purchases, while a fifth said they would rely purely on off-the-shelf purchases for mobile apps.

· Only 12% of organisations said they would acquire applications strictly through in-house development, while 3% were not sure how they would acquire applications.

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