Mahesh Gupta, Vice President, Borderless Networks – Cisco India & SAARC, talks to KTP Radhika about how mobility is becoming a reality in Indian workplaces and the ways for CIOs to tackle the challenges associated with it
How is the demand for networking products growing in the mid-market segment compared to the large enterprise customers?
There has been a clear change in the mindset of SMBs who now view IT investment as a strategic decision. More so when they are looking at adopting technologies that will help them scale their business and give them a competitive edge. In addition to this, with the increasing proliferation of end user devices in the workspace, mobility and bring your own device (BYOD) is becoming a reality for most organizations.
Compared to enterprises, a significant number of SMBs are still at a basic technology adoption level. SMBs are shifting to mobile devices and BYOD than sticking to traditional computers and notebooks. In addition to this, cloud based collaboration and video is fast becoming preferred investment options among them.
Mobility is catching on in workplaces all over the world. What is the scenario in India?
A recent recent Cisco IBSG’s Horizons study, which surveyed over 600 IT leaders from India, revealed that BYOD is no longer an emerging trend but a reality in India. The study found most Indian organizations are now enabling BYOD. 94% of respondents opined that BYOD is a growing trend within their organizations. According to the study’s findings, India has the highest percentage (69%) of knowledge workers who use a mobile device to do their jobs, just ahead of the United States (67%), outpacing the global average (60%). In addition, Indian organizations spend a high percentage of IT budgets on mobility.
What are the host of challenges associated with BYOD for the IT team?
Since mobile devices are likely to open new paths of intrusion, IT departments are grappling with the challenge of enforcing policies to ensure that only authorized people have access to sensitive information. End devices are also evolving rapidly, and it is becoming difficult for companies to keep pace and support all devices being used to access corporate assets. At the same time, the employees are increasingly demanding the flexibility to access corporate resources anywhere, anytime, from any device of their choice. Hence, organizations are rethinking their IT architectures; areas of focus being application availability, network readiness, security, and policy frameworks.
IT leaders are therefore looking to evaluate options which are intelligent enough to protect each access layer of the network, simplify reduce the workload of the IT team and unify the processes involved in managing a wired and a wireless framework
Growth in initiatives promoting mobility and flexibility also affect data security, access control, platform maintenance, application support, and much more, so CIOs will need to ensure that the cost for enabling a secure and seamless BYOD experience does not spiral out of control. Moreover, educating and ensuring that the workforce complies with this shift in policies is also a challenge in itself.
In what all ways is Cisco helping CIOs to handle these challenges? What are your offerings in this space?
Cisco understands CIO challenges and our solutions are designed to simplify IT operations and deliver work-your-way user experience, securely with unified policy and essential controls necessary to support this beyond BYOD work environment.
Our BYOD smart solution provides a comprehensive approach to enable organizations – effectively design, manage, and control the access of a BYOD network. The solution enables them to offer a seamless, secure and robust BYOD infrastructure to enhance user experience and productivity. For organizations, the main benefit of the solution is being able to facilitate a consistent experience across locations and devices, with the Cisco unified access portfolio of products. Solutions under the unified access portfolio are designed to further simplify IT operations and user experience by deploying a one policy, one management, and one network approach.
How has the adoption of borderless network architecture been so far?
Borderless networks is Cisco’s holistic, next generation vision and architecture that delivers a borderless experience. This experience allows employees, customers, and partners to connect and communicate anytime, anywhere, on any device in a manner that is seamless, secure, and reliable. Organizations, both large and small, are aware of the benefits from Cisco’s borderless networking framework as it can streamline business processes and boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness. This is driving the adoption for borderless network architecture in India and globally.