Q: Tell me about your role at IBM.
A: My role is to help organisations manage the devices that they give their employees. This is usually a laptop or a desktop but more and more, people are becoming mobile. They're wanting to use Blackberries, iPads. From a business perspective there are significant issues around security and ongoing performance that come with using these devices.

Q: What types of requests do you receive from businesses?
A: With all this information floating around wireless networks, many people don't know whether they're secure or not. If you don't know, then you've got to beef up your technology so you establish your own secure virtual private network between the device you're letting someone use and your own organisation. So this is a key area people seek help. At the device management level, it's predominantly around: How do I manage my desktop and laptop more effectively? How do I change my standard operating environment? How do I manage my licences so that I'm only paying for one support copy of Adobe rather than five? We can look at their operating environment and help with the design. Organisations realise that doing it themselves is creating islands of technologies and challenges in managing it all, so they would like to just say, "Look, can someone take care of this?"

Q: How can a partner help organisations better manage their mobile workers?
A: Say you have Sales Force One for your client relationship management and your sales forecasting. That's okay, but what are you going to use for your email? What are you going to use for your word processing? And where are these applications going to live? You want them all to be in the network somewhere. Does each one have a separate website or do you want to go through a secure portal that effectively becomes your company portal? A partner can help people make that decision, and then work with them to build the solution.

Q: How do you go about developing a solution like this?
A: The simple way is to just take the desktop and put it in the back room. And there are some applications that lend themselves to that, but then that may not be the best solution from an environment and data plan perspective. We look at the applications they currently have and ask which ones can be completely virtualised. You obviously need a level of quality of service on your network so that you can, for instance, use that old version of the application and make it work at a satisfactory level. But for the next version you might take it off the desktop, put it on another server and publish that back independently. So developing the right solution is an ongoing process.

Q: How are new technologies like cloud coming in to play?
A: We talk a lot about cloud computing and for my part of the business, that's the virtual desktop. So conceptually, you could take your desktop as it is today and publish that through the internet as long as you've got a secure browser. What we're finding more and more is that applications will get stripped off the desktop and you'll only use them through a browser. Now in a lot of cases you can't have all your applications available from the network at one time. Technically, it is possible. But if I leave my iPad on and I roam around Asia-Pacific, I'll run up a three thousand dollar bill in a month. Even if you look at it from someone just working in Australia, the data plans can get quite high. So to get all of this to work, you've almost got to deconstruct the desktop as it is today and say, "How, over time, will I publish those applications?" That lends itself to software-as-a-service solutions. I see my role as helping our clients develop a roadmap to move from the management of the devices they've got today to the virtual world of tomorrow.

Collaboration software and social networking tools are for teenagers and time wasters. Right?

Not according to Vaughan Rivett.

He believes collaboration software and social business applications can increase productivity and innovation, reduce the number of meetings, increase speed to market, enable staff retention and prevent leakage of company knowledge.

The fact that IBM Connections (collaboration software that provides an on-premise solution where a customer can put it on one of their own servers) is the fastest selling product that IBM has ever had, indicates some companies are already aware of the advantages of collaboration.

Collaboration is mainly the ability to form cross-functional teams to talk about ideas, share knowledge, problem solve and work towards a common goal. Collaboration software means the members of those teams no longer need to be in the same room, same building or even the same continent. They can work effectively anywhere they have an Internet connection.

Collaboration software solutions like IBM Connections, are empowering employees to easily share videos, pictures, content tags, blogs, status updates and wikis with their international peers.

If your company is not yet involved in these online communities, be warned: there are security implications when organisations choose not to engage with internally managed social technology.

Members of the workforce can create their own social networking pages, where they can discuss work-related topics without their company’s control. Once an organisation sets-up social business capabilities in-house, these discussions can be captured within the organisation’s secure environment.

By integrating this kind of technology into your website, you can create a controlled environment for your sensitive information instead of risking online dissemination without your knowledge or permission.

Social networking may not sound like a business tool, but it can offer great advantages in problem solving, time saving and team work while also helping to protect valuable company information.

“Any device, any time, any place” may sound like a challenge to some sort of duel, but according to David Cannon, it’s actually a promise represented by genuine ‘mobility’. But with that promise comes the next problem likely to keep CIOs awake at night: secure mobility.

David says: “Secure mobility is the ability to gain secure access to an organisation’s IT infrastructure using virtually any device through a secure Internet solution. So, no matter where you are or whether you have a tablet, a phone, a laptop or something else, you will be able to connect securely with your work and workplace.”

However, connecting “securely with your work and workplace” can be more complex than it sounds. Unfortunately, the convenience of “Any device, any time, any place”, comes with new risks for old security. The smartphone, laptop and PC that are being used by staff, including privately owned devices, create their own type of threat.

According to David: “The phone can be used as a Trojan to basically bypass the firewalls because you can connect your mobile phone to your computer whilst you’re in the organisation‘s environment.” The app. store contains these same risks. Your employees could inadvertently download malware as part of an application and affect your organisation’s network.

“There are issues in terms of the type and amount of data that’s now available on mobile devices. So data loss is also a significant issue that needs to be addressed from a security approach as well.” Without taking the right precautions, loss of information, privacy and control is a serious reality.

When IT managers of midsized companies are inundated with work, they may not have the time to be across every security detail, so it could be temping to implement a strategy to limit the amount of connectivity within the business. But according to David: “The reality is that the world is not like that.” By restricting your company’s IT networking capabilities, you can lose your competitive advantage.

He believes the current attitude amongst midsized businesses towards this sort of security, is to trust the employees to do the right thing. But not all end users understand what is and isn’t appropriate as they don’t realise the impact their devices can have on the IT security of their organisation. Therefore, employees need to be educated about correct endpoint usage within the company environment.

By establishing a policy, an organisation can reduce some of the hazards associated with putting all the faith in the hands of its employees. A security policy puts in writing the rules and restrictions associated with data sharing. Employees can refer to this as guidance when taking data out of an enterprise and keeping it on various devices, whether it’s a mobile phone, a USB key or a laptop.

But if you don’t know what data is going where and how important that data is, how helpful is a written policy? Indeed how do you come up with a useful policy?

“That is definitely something IBM can do for its customers. Through a process of consultation to understand the environment, we can help assess what data has a high level of security risk and implement solutions to mitigate that risk. You can then establish a policy around the creation and usage of data across the organisation.”

Mobility isn’t just bringing new challenges. There can be large financial benefits too.

This is leading to the long-promised fixed to mobile convergence, where telephony costs can be significantly reduced using the IP for voice calls. With an appropriate telephone exchange, both local and regional calls can be made via the Internet. “A midsized business should be looking at going straight to this level of technology as their means of return on investment.“

The types of resources that could manage an ever-shifting security environment were traditionally very expensive David says. This is no longer true. Organisations like IBM understand the issues businesses are faced with and are providing managed services that midsized businesses can tap into. They have experts who can talk through business issues and find a solution for every business need.