If software is eating the world, why stop at the workplace?

Marc Andreesen of venture capitalists Andreesen Horowitz famously stated that “Software is eating the world.” This meant specialist products, knowledge and skills were being replaced with software that could replicate tasks and services for pennies. Digital cameras, MP3 players, games consoles and dedicated computing devices have been replaced with apps on smartphones.

 

For businesses, this process is beginning to affect their offices too. Today, it’s no longer necessary for all staff to come into the office all the time. Indeed, individuals working remotely or in other locations can often deliver the same levels of productivity as they would in the main office.

 

This new degree of mobility is made possible through software. However, instead of just allowing knowledge workers to work where and when suits them, this trend is growing and affecting more employees. Just as networking and compute power has been liberated by the advent of virtualisation and software defined networking, today there is an increase in mobility that has led to the growth of the Software-Defined Workplace, or SDWP.

 

SDWP covers the combination of new technologies that, when used together, can free employees from their specific desks. This approach goes further than simply letting users work from their own laptops or mobile devices, or adding unified communications into the mix; instead, SDWP involves using these technologies as part of a wider strategy when it comes to supporting mobility.

 

The future for enterprise IT in SDWP deployments

To bring together all the various applications, service delivery methods and user personalisation, there are two areas that have to be considered. The first is the existing IT stack that a company might have in place. For many companies, this will include a mix of traditional applications that have a client-server architecture and existing web applications that can be accessed via browser sessions.

 

Alongside these existing applications, new cloud-based services may also be in place delivered either from a hybrid cloud installation or consumed from public cloud service providers. This huge mix of applications has to be made available to all employees in a consistent way.

 

From the enterprise IT perspective, this will involve planning out future strategies for those applications. This could be based on further use of virtualisation to streamline internal applications, or a gradual replacement of traditional services with new apps that are hosted in the cloud. This approach can be combined with software defined networking to make the use of network resources more efficient over time, and without getting locked into specific approaches for delivering services.

 

Alongside this internal enterprise IT strategy, SDWP will also involve looking at the end-user side of the equation as well. Putting a mobility strategy in place to cope with the greater choice and flexibility around access to IT services will be essential. The most important point here is that this has to go beyond simply letting users choose their own device, or bringing in their own phones or tablets to be used with work applications.

 

Instead, SDWP will have to embrace and extend these devices into a wider mobility strategy that takes into account how people work over time. Rather than simply letting more devices get used for work purposes, the aim should be to provide a consistent experience across those devices. By looking at the user experience and requirements that are available across mobile, tablet and laptops, enterprise IT teams can ensure that employees can get the right applications and services wherever those workers happen to be.

 

At the same time, tracking this activity for security and audit purposes is also required. As more endpoints can be used for work – and data can be stored or created across those endpoints – this represents a potential challenge for IT in delivering security for that company data over time. As users can create new data files on their laptop or phone, that file may contain sensitive data that should be protected based on corporate security guidelines.

 

The challenge here is that these devices may never come into the office. Under the aegis of SDWP, the usual control points of the corporate firewall and internal network cannot be relied upon. Instead, IT has to ensure that all assets and data are automatically tracked and the right policies applied, regardless of the time or location where data might be created.

 

The move to SDWP offers companies the opportunity to help employees be more productive, as well as reducing their costs. However, this does mean that new approaches to managing enterprise applications, mobility strategies and corporate data security will be required. For those that embrace SDWP, the resulting benefits should add up to greater cost savings and business efficiency.