Mobile DevOps and Enterprise Mobility

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What are the key ingredients of a corporate mobility policy?

Meeting the demands of mobil-ity with DevOps best practices

Inside the new enterprise mobile technology stack

here

’

s more to

going mobile than just

de-ploying and supporting devices.

Enter-prises should understand the

fundamentals of mobile device policy.

With a plethora of mobile app dev platforms, management suites

and backup products, it’s essential to make them work well together

to be successful. This e-guide highlights the key ingredients of a

corporate mobility policy, and how to meet the demands of mobility

with DevOps best practices.

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WHAT ARE THE KEY INGREDIENTS OF A CORPORATE

MOBILITY POLICY?

Enterprises are continuing to transition to mobile device programs, but most of them only have a vague concept of how to plan and execute a successful mo-bility policy.

Where should organizations start for a comprehensive corporate mobility policy? As the old adage goes, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. The good news is that enough companies have now gone mobile that the IT community has picked up on several frameworks for executing a successful mobility policy -- one that lays out security and support regulations for em-ployees so everyone knows what’s expected.

Newcomers should consider the following suggestions as you enter the mobility decision-making process:

Create a mobility team. A lot of companies make the mistake of not devoting enough human capital to prepare for, and oversee, the changeover to a mobile workforce. Formalize a group that will coordinate the creation and enforce-ment of a corporate mobility policy and overall enterprise mobile strategy. This

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group should include company executives and IT leadership, but also represen-tatives from the business, legal, human resources, sourcing/procurement and operations departments.

Standardize devices. Not only should enterprise mobility policies provide guidance for hardware and mobile operating systems, but they should also specify who will be liable for device misuse and potential loss. This includes corporate-owned and employee-owned devices under bring your own device. Don't forget financial factors such as telecommunications costs, mobility man-agement service fees, data plan costs and employee reimbursements for using personal devices for corporate activities.

Specify authorized users. Determine who in your company may have mo-bile access to enterprise networks and which networks and systems will be securely exposed. Plenty of enterprises conclude that not everyone should be given full mobile capabilities, or even any. So, the organization must provide a detailed mobile access plan to determine who has access to what, when and where.

Classify data. Similar to the last point, not every network drive or Share-Point team site is appropriate for universal access. Data security is paramount, and companies need an information architecture strategy to detail which

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content repositories will be allowed and to whom.

Set access privileges. Consider how you are currently managing employee access and privileges. Most mobile products are only as reliable as the access controls Active Directory provides. IT departments need to keep Active Direc-tory and other controls up to date with evolving mobile best practices.

Set acceptable-use policies. Let’s be clear about this: The standards for "ap-propriate use" of a mobile device shouldn't be the same as those for on-premises PCs. The frontier for endpoint security and data loss prevention is pushed out with mobile devices, and employees don’t always know that what’s acceptable on their office PC might not be appropriate on a mobile device. Avoid vague guidelines, which can mislead employees or leave organizations liable for data security breaches.

Use MDM for mobile security. Your choice of a mobile device management (MDM) product affects enterprise security and IT management of mobile de-vices, network access and data. MDM is directly linked to the success of a mo-bility strategy and the protection of company data. Take all the time you need to research and find the right MDM service for you, and only choose from proven vendors. Outline this management plan in your mobility policy to ensure that workers know how their device may or may not be affected by IT’s software.

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Mobile initiatives require maintenance and frequent attention to the changing dynamics of endpoint management, but starting off on the right foot can be just as important. By including the above guidelines in your mobility policy, your enterprise can minimize potential complications of transitioning to a mobile-friendly work environment.

MEETING THE DEMANDS OF MOBILITY WITH DEVOPS

BEST PRACTICES

DevOps is a disruptive trend in enterprise IT, particularly in the data center. As enterprise mobility grows, more businesses are turning to DevOps for help improving app dev and management.

By bringing together developers and operations staff, automating manual processes and promoting continuous delivery, DevOps best practices can help organizations more efficiently build, manage and scale their server-based ap-plications. The reasons for its emergence in enterprise mobility aren't surpris-ing. Many of DevOps' principles -- multi-platform testing and development,

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rapid release cycles, tight integration between development and management -- are key tenets of successful mobile initiatives.

Still, this emerging concept of mobile DevOps faces its fair share of chal-lenges. Skeptical business leaders, old-school security mindsets and a shortage of development skills can all stop adoption in its tracks.

"DevOps is fundamentally a change in process," said Andi Mann, vice presi-dent in the CTO's office at CA Technologies. "It's very much a cultural differ-ence. It's challenging for large enterprises to do that sort of transformation."

Manually monitoring and managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastruc-tures becomes difficult, if not impossible, at a certain scale. The same holds true for testing and developing the applications that run on these infrastructures -- especially when that development process can take months and involve hun-dreds of feature updates.

Pioneered late last decade, DevOps aims to solve the problems that have arisen as enterprise computing has grown more complex. It tackles develop-ment and IT operations as a whole, not separate departdevelop-ments with separate staff using separate processes. It promotes the use of coding to automate tasks. And it relies on continuous delivery, an ongoing cycle of developing, testing and deploying applications with incremental feature updates.

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WITH USER RATINGS, DEVELOPERS SEE STARS

If continuous delivery sounds familiar, that's because it's a common approach to mobile app development. It's very different than traditional enterprise appli-cation development, which favors large, infrequent updates packed with fixes and new features. In the mobile era, developers don't have the luxury of taking that much time. With the advent of app stores and user ratings, developers must respond quickly to feedback from users.

If it takes a few months to respond to users' complaints and suggestions, app ratings will go down and abandonment rates will go up, said Jeffrey Ham-mond, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. That's where mobile DevOps comes in.

"You want to get feedback as quickly as possible, and then you want to act on that feedback as quickly as possible," Hammond said. "It's really hard to increase that speed without DevOps principles."

With DevOps best practices, IT can open the door to more information about user satisfaction and activity within an app -- not only through reviews and other forms of direct feedback, but through in-app analytics as well. De-velopers can build monitoring into apps and get real-time information about crashes, user behavior and more. The wealth of information such analytics

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can provide would be impossible to collect manually, especially when there are different versions of a mobile app built for multiple operating systems, OS versions and devices. Android alone has thousands of permutations of OS ver-sions and devices currently in use, Hammond said.

"I see a lot of pressure for DevOps in the mobile space," he said. "It starts with the premise that you can't possibly test all the mobile applications on all the platforms they will be released on."

GETTING OPS IN LINE

DevOps doesn't stop with the user-facing features of an application. It's also an important part of tying apps into back-end infrastructure, data reposito-ries and management systems. By building these hooks into an app during the development process, organizations can realize faster deployment times and adapt more easily to infrastructure modifications, such as the addition of a new storage location or a change in how network traffic is handled between the app and the back end.

"Ops has to be in line with the product development cycle," said Carl Caum, a technical marketing manager at Puppet Labs, a vendor of IT automation software.

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Puppet lets engineers write code that represents certain attributes of their infrastructure. When building an app, developers can simply include that code instead of writing the back-end infrastructure integration from scratch. If the infrastructure tie-in needs to change, they just swap out the old code for new code.

MOBILE DEVOPS ROADBLOCKS

It's easy to view mobile DevOps through rose-colored glasses, but it does face some significant challenges.

Business buy-in: Some of the problems mobile DevOps solves -- such as increased demand on back-end services -- have yet to materialize, which can make it hard to demonstrate its value.

"DevOps is not a tool," Caum said. "You can't buy it. You can't hire for it. The company itself has to buy into it."

But it's not always an easy sell, said Marty Resnick, a mobile strategist at a large global enterprise. In response, he and his team have focused on specific aspects of mobile DevOps that can show immediate return on investment. One example is automated quality assurance testing, which saves time over manual testing.

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Lack of skills: Mobile apps are written in different languages and with dif-ferent design principles than traditional enterprise applications. About two-thirds of Hammond's clients use outside firms to build their apps because they can't do it themselves, he said.

"Basic development skills are in extremely short supply," he said.

Corporate culture: This is perhaps the most daunting obstacle to the adop-tion of mobile DevOps -- and DevOps in general. Organizaadop-tions can be hesitant to change their tried-and-true development processes or integrate their tradi-tionally separate development and operations staffs.

"One of the biggest challenges we see as an industry is just getting compa-nies to acknowledge the need to tear down these siloes," Caum said.

Security: Breaking down the wall between security and DevOps can be even more difficult than getting development and operations on the same page.

"A lot of security pros see themselves as a logical roadblock," Mann said. "A lot of them, though, are starting to be a little bit more progressive and seeing themselves as enablers of business."

Involving security in DevOps pays dividends by enabling policy-driven de-velopment, Caum said. For example, the security team can write a policy that governs what an app can and can't do with the data it accesses. The DevOps

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team can then write code that automatically tests if an app complies with this policy -- as it's being built, not afterward.

MOBILE AS A DEVOPS TEST BED

DevOps is a disruptive trend, as is enterprise mobility. Embracing both at the same time may seem like more than a business can handle, but proponents say it's more efficient.

"It's definitely easier, because you're ripping the Band-Aid off," Mann said. "You're doing it all in one hit."

In fact, mobility is a logical starting point for a DevOps initiative, because it's new and unencumbered by legacy systems and processes, Mann said.

Plus, in organizations that are just starting to go mobile, the mobility team is usually fairly small. That means they have more leeway to experiment and learn what works and what doesn't, Resnick said.

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INSIDE THE NEW ENTERPRISE MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

STACK

Business and IT leaders talk a lot about going mobile these days. What does that really mean?

Mobile is not a product that organizations can buy or a service they can subscribe to. It is the aggregation of multiple products and services -- along with new business processes and approaches to IT -- to create a more produc-tive, flexible, on-the-go business. The new mobile technology stack includes everything from traditional technologies such as backup and data loss preven-tion to emerging applicapreven-tion development platforms and management suites. This special report takes a look at the wide array of enterprise mobile tech-nology available. Executives, IT professionals and developers will learn how to choose the right products and services and discover how such seemingly disparate technology can all work together to push business forward into the mobile era.

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MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

One throat to choke versus best of breed is a debate as old as IT itself, and the en-terprise mobility market is right in the middle of the action these days. Several vendors, through a combination of acquisitions and in-house product develop-ment, claim to offer the complete enterprise mobile technology stack. Large mobile application development platform (MADP) providers, for example, also offer software that lets IT manage the apps built on their platforms, plus cloud services that allow the apps to access back-end infrastructure. But many tools are still immature, and no one vendor has everything.

ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MANAGEMENT

Every organization with mobile workers needs some way to manage their de-vices and applications. That doesn't necessarily mean management should be top priority. Organizations may rush into deploying enterprise mobility man-agement (EMM), because the technology is such a hot topic, but the proper goals must first be in place. EMM's three main components -- mobile device management, mobile application management and mobile content manage-ment -- all address different issues, and if those issues don't align with impor-tant business initiatives, EMM may go to waste.

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MOBILE BACKUP AND DATA PROTECTION

Despite the proliferation of mobile devices, the concept of mobile backup hasn't taken off. That hasn't stopped vendors from jumping into the market. Mobile backup has a unique set of requirements and challenges that make it very dif-ferent from traditional endpoint backup. Organizations must consider all of these factors -- such as corporate network access requirements and the role of the cloud -- while evaluating mobile backup products. It's also important to recognize that mobile backup isn't the same as enterprise file sync and sharing, a more user-focused approach to providing data access across multiple devices.

UNIFIED ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT

Laptops and desktops aren't typically part of the mobile technology conversa-tion. That's starting to change, thanks to an emerging security approach called unified endpoint management (UEM). The goal of UEM is to let IT and secu-rity pros control and secure laptops, desktops and mobile devices in the same fashion, all through one console. It's an admirable goal, and there's a growing number of products that claim to achieve it. Roadblocks remain, however. UEM may help businesses go mobile one day, but for now, mobile device management and traditional PC management are just too different.

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