Enterprise IT systems are undergoing continual evolution and the rate of change is snowballing. With the constant need to drive business efficiency, “data insight” or more specifically the instantaneous always available, anywhere, any device access to it; is the pot of gold organisations are looking for.
The mobile compute platform has changed business forever, placing more powerful machines in our pockets than sat on desks just a few years ago. But more importantly the connectivity they bring is unprecedented; we are without a doubt hyper-connected.
The average enterprise produces mountains of data every day, and immense value can be derived from data analytic systems churning through the data haystack to find the latest insights. Even the most structured data; painstakingly compiled by accountants, analysts and line of business managers, into reports with financial charts, trend analysis, recommendations for review, simply don’t exploit the hyper connectivity we experience in our daily lives. Reports designed to be consumed by heads of the organisation such as directors and board members. Reports flooded with sensitive data, critical for the smooth running of the enterprise. Reports checked-in as final on the enterprise content management system before thousands of pages are sent to be printed and bound for delivery to the board meeting. In short the issue & opportunity is user experience. Think about distributing a large sensitive report electronically to just 20 mobile devices in a secure way (that’s fewer than in a medium sized board meeting). It’s already checked into SharePoint on the Intranet so they could all just access it directly right? Sure they could, its technically possible and most enterprises already have all the pieces in place for that to happen.
All you need to do is:
If not already done; configure the VPN on their mobile device
Login to the VPN with a username and password, and most likely a MFA token
Open a link to the content (possibly emailed to them)
Enter another username and password when SharePoint prompts them
The age old alternative is to open the bound copy printed yesterday sitting in front of them. This lack of great user experience has caused a breakdown in the Air Gap between the device and the user. It may be the first thing they reach for to take a photo of the kids or even when opening a bar tab with Clipp.
IT doesn’t need to be this hard.
Imagine if secure instantaneous access was available with just one press of an icon? That’s exactly what a customer recently engaged us for.
The answer lies in the silver bullet that is “Integration”. There is no one killer app which runs on any device, connects securely to any enterprise and provides a seamless experience for all users.
The solution is to leverage knowledge and experience integrating across the plethora of components which most enterprises already have an investment in. Weaving them together with a intent on delivering business value by focusing on the end-user. In this most recent example the airloom engineering team integrated a solution using nothing more than technologies the customer had already deployed along with airloom’s engineering expertise; the solution touched the following components:
Enterprise Mobility Management platform
Application Access Gateway appliances
Dynamic DNS Services
Internal Certificate Authority
Active Directory Authentication
Kerberos Constrained Delegation
SharePoint Application Servers
While each of these deployed technologies provides its own value to the organisation, when combined into a single solution the result is exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.
The combination of these technologies, provides a elegant solution which allows our customers executive team a single step solution to accessing their critical data. To quote the late great Steve Jobs “Simple can be harder than
complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
At airloom we focus on putting in the hard engineering work to deliver seamless simplicity for our customers, ensuring the business result is always delivering greater than the sum of the technology parts.