How hybrid IT can support enterprise mobility White Paper How hybrid IT can support enterprise mobility How can you easily integrate document solutions across desktops and the cloud to better meet business demands? Table of contents 1: Lockdown isn’t the answer 1: IT must be friendly to employees’ mobility needs 2: Hybrid IT isn’t easy to manage 2: Why not use cloud services only? 3: A document solution must be IT-friendly, too 3: Conclusion In our first white paper, “A delicate balance: The competing needs of IT and users in a mobile world,” we discussed how the emergence of a highly mobile workforce has made IT management infinitely more complex. Personal devices have invaded many workplaces and coopted enterprise networks, and some workers are using them to transmit and store sensitive company documents. In the second white paper, “Define your data for better document security,” we suggest ways for you to mitigate risk to content and documents in a mobile world. In this paper, we explore the IT management environment. How can you integrate document solutions across desktops, mobile apps, and the cloud to better meet business demands, without creating so much complexity that it causes IT to suffer? Lockdown isn’t the answer Workers love the productivity ecosystem that has sprung up around the ways they work in a mobile world. When employees encounter a problem that can’t be easily solved with in-house IT, the first place they look is online or in an app store. Moments later, their problems are solved—but IT’s problems are only beginning. This is the third paper in a three-part series that explores how IT can enable mobile employees to work productively with documents without sacrificing IT’s needs. Part I: A delicate balance: The competing needs of IT and users in a mobile world Part II: Define your data for better document security Part III: How hybrid IT can support enterprise mobility For example, when a traveling sales rep becomes frustrated with his inability to access contracts while on the road with an iPad, chances are he’ll quickly realize that he could save a lot of time, close more deals, and satisfy his customers better if he simply saves contracts to a personal cloud-based storage folder. It’s easy for employees to use third-party cloud services to quickly and cheaply meet their technology needs without waiting for anyone’s approval. While IT’s ideal solution might be to ban this type of workaround entirely, it might not be easy to do. Attempts to cut off this kind of access could lead to employee dissatisfaction, and understandably so. Everyone— including enterprise leaders—can work with greater speed and agility when they have access to software-as-aservice (SaaS) solutions that facilitate mobile working. IT must be friendly to employees’ mobility needs Given that hybrid IT—the mix of traditional, on-premises software and third-party cloud services—is here to stay for the foreseeable future, you need to find a solution that can satisfy employees’ needs to work more effectively. From employees’ perspective, an ideal document productivity solution would: • Seamlessly integrate mobile apps with traditional, on-premises software that can use the full computing power of a PC, so they can perform compute-intensive tasks on a desktop but still access critical functionality on a mobile device. • Enable them to have multiple applications open at once, efficiently switch back and forth, and quickly perform cross-app functions such as copy and paste—something not easily done on a tablet or smartphone. • Provide the same intuitive user experience on all platforms and operating systems that IT supports, not just on the most popular ones. • Sync documents across devices via the cloud using enterprise-level security, letting them work on multiple devices but helping IT to mitigate security risk and eliminate data leakage. In short, employees would like to have all the functionality currently available, with none of the constraints that IT needs to secure and manage enterprise information.

Hybrid IT isn’t easy to manage The obvious answer to the discrepancy between knowledge workers’ needs and IT’s needs is to move toward a hybrid IT model. And that is, indeed, where many enterprises are headed. But integrating cloud services with on-premises applications is complicated on many levels. First, it’s hard to manage deployment and licensing. IT departments are accustomed to managing desktop software with certain tools—such as SCCM and Active Directory—that ease administration by letting them manage multiple users at a time. But most SaaS solutions can’t be managed with the same enterprise...

A document solution must be IT-friendly, too Nearly all of the solution characteristics that workers need are at odds with what IT traditionally wants. Despite these tensions, enterprises need to find a solution that simultaneously creates a positive experience for business and for IT. From IT’s perspective, the ideal document productivity solution would make it easy to manage traditional, centralized license deployments and updates on the desktop alongside per user, cross-device cloud deployments. The solution should address the following areas. Security • Integrate with single sign-on capabilities...