Security Concerns – The High Hurdle for Mobile Enablement in the Enterprise

by Eric Klein | 07/30/2013

VDC data has repeatedly shown that organizations recognize the opportunity to benefit from consumer-oriented mobile devices from a business context; however, many CIOs remain adverse to extending mobile applications to their workforce. This is due to a variety of factors that range from acknowledging that they are not properly equipped to support mobile platforms (from an IT and resource perspective) to being unable to successfully articulate the value proposition and ROI from mobile enablement to corporate leaders. However, as you might expect, security concerns remain a high hurdle and are why the most rational well-planned business cases for investing in a mobile solution are regularly put on the back burner. As shown below, 62% of respondents to a recent VDC survey with >$1B in annual revenue stated that security concerns were a major challenge when evaluating or implementing a mobile solution.

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There is no question that presenting the business case for mobile IT investments is a challenge, even for CIOs at progressive companies. It is up to these leaders to demonstrate that mobility investments can positively impact shareholder value and drive business results. While this is no easy task, vendors are well aware of the need to emphasize their security capabilities — this has made developing enhanced security features into enterprise-oriented solutions a key priority, and is opening up significant opportunities for mobile-first, best-of-breed security-oriented ISVs to partner with established incumbent vendors (e.g., Mocana's recent partnership with SAP).

MDM vendors are a significant force in the mobile security software market, accounting ~60% of 2012 revenues in our upcoming (August 2013) mobile security report. However, moving forward, traditional MDM vendors will be challenged to evolve their platforms quickly enough to keep up with the pace of innovation occurring amongst security-oriented ISVs. For this reason it is imperative that MDM vendors embrace the mobile ecosystem to benefit from the innovative solutions that are being brought forth by mobile-first ISVs.