With the enterprise app market growing at an exponential rate –
with expectations of it to grow 27% in 2016 alone – businesses are asking more
and more questions related to mobility development, testing and support. A
question that we commonly hear is, “how should we protect strategic data on
mobile devices used to build, test, and support apps?” We’ll dive into some
details below, but the answer looks something like this:
Mobile devices have become the dominant venue for delivering
customer-facing, B2B, and workplace apps as enterprise IT groups move from
“mobile first” to “mobile everything.” While mobility brings ease of use to end
users, enterprise IT faces massive challenges brought about by the enormous
variety of device types and software platforms in the market. Moreover,
development and testing has dramatically changed – in earlier, desktop-Web
development, the number of test cases largely determined quality, since there
was little variation among browsers. In mobility, however, quality is determined
both by the number of mobile device testing cases and the variety of
devices tested.
At the sunset of desktop Web’s dominance, its development hums
along using Agile methodologies and DevOps capabilities; enterprise IT is able
to leverage virtual servers to facilitate rapid change, continuous deployment,
and to closely align production and test environments. However, more apps,
higher end user expectations, and the burgeoning proliferation of mobile device
types quickly bring chaos to the “mobile everything” enterprise, and DevOps
gains can grind to a halt.
For enterprise apps, new technologies are needed to bring order
to the chaos of mobile development. The new core of the infrastructure is the
mobile device cloud that can easily make a variety of devices available to
developers and testers and can deliver key DevOps capabilities. A mobile device
cloud must perform well, offer scheduling and DevOps capabilities, and be
secure. As the core component, a device cloud can speed app delivery, reduce
capital outlays, and reduce rework costs.
