The much hyped security risk of mobile devices reflects a similar story that was heard continually as notebook shipments rapidly grew to challenge those of desktops over the past decade. In an era where workers expect access to their corporate information wherever they travel, it is rare to find a company that still hasn't equipped its knowledge workers with notebooks. Many have all but done away with desktops, preferring to give their workers the ability to take their information with them where they need it.
The one major difference: notebooks may not be connected to the corporate network for days or weeks at a time, and even then they may not stay attached long enough for new software updates to be fully downloaded. Travelling employees may only connect sporadically from the field, and often over slow dial-up connections that will simply not be able to carry the many megabytes typically required for a software update.
"You don't want to be sitting in a hotel room at night dialling into my e-mail system back at the office and suddenly find that you've got a 50MB patch set being pushed down to me because somebody in IT thought it was a good idea to push this out to everyone at this point in time," says Computer Associates principal consultant for enterprise management Rob Crutchley.
For remote device management software, the answer to this problem has been patience. Contemporary management platforms automatically detect how much bandwidth is available to a mobile user, progressively downloading updates in small chunks whenever the opportunity arises. If the user is busy checking e-mail or surfing the Web, the update application simply backs off to free up precious bandwidth. Once the user passes through the office and can connect using the faster wireless LAN, opportunistic management applications up the throttle to finish the job.
"A laptop is effectively a networked device connected to a LAN one day, and the next day it's a mobile device," says Dale Dixon, product line manager with remote management vendor ManageSoft. "That's where the dynamic nature of mobile devices becomes important. An administrator shouldn't need to care [what devices are connected and how]; the administrator should just be able to say 'I want to roll this application out to a group of users, and the technology should be able to deal with it'."
Portable devices, however, change the nature of the challenge significantly. Mobile phones are constantly connected via the GPRS service of ubiquitous GSM mobile networks, a fact that Blackberries and their many clones have built upon to produce always-connected wireless data terminals.
GPRS, however, is still slow and expensive -- meaning that even though devices may be connected to the corporate network, they have less bandwidth than a notebook would over a dial-up connection. This makes it tricky to push large software updates out to phones that are looking less like phones and more like miniature remote desktops every day.
Coming 3G mobile networks will make transferring data faster and allow management tools to address mobiles like any other IP end point. However, like any other end point these mobile devices will still need to be managed more and more like conventional desktops. True to its desktop roots, for example, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 includes features for pushing image updates to remote devices, which download the new code at a trickle. Yet allowing each device to manage itself, without a central record of each device's status and licensing requirements for installed applications, is a recipe for disaster.
To this end, traditionally desktop-focused management platforms such as ManageSoft, Novell ZENworks, and others have recently been given features specifically for managing mobile devices. Such platforms can track configuration of mobile devices, notebooks, and desktops through a single interface; enforce a range of standard operating environments (SOEs) based on each user's profile and privileges; and drip-feed updates to remote devices based on the bandwidth available to them.
I just watched a webcast on managing Windows Mobile at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msecmobility.aspx. I would guess that mobile phone use will grow quickly in the next decade.