I had the pleasure of visiting six airports in the last two weeks and noticed an abundance of advertisements featuring a wide variety of technologies based in the cloud. Every conference has tracks on the cloud. In every meeting the work ‘cloud’ sneaks in. Doing business in the Cloud is fast becoming the new normal.
If you’ve been following SAP for any period of time, you probably already know that SAP has deep experience serving 50+ million cloud users, with some of the world’s largest cloud implementations. Its about providing an unparalleled user experience, with mobile access in mind. And its flexible to use however and whenever you want.
I was recently readying a paper written by Oxford Economics and sponsored by SAP (available here). It gave a great overview of how in less than a decade, the cloud has gone from a distant vision to the mainstream of business technology. As companies move core functions into the cloud, they are seeing the opportunities it affords to help transform business. To me, that transformation is especially interesting when it comes to mobile security, a core requirement of any company going mobile. Companies are continuing to invest in the cloud — and many SAP customers are already taking advantage of the benefits when it comes to mobility.
In the paper, a survey is referenced that Oxford Economics and SAP completed in 2014 in which 200 senior business and IT executives around the world were asked about their adoption and use of cloud technology. The survey showed that the early days of inflated expectations have given way to the reality of the hard work of implementation and day-to-day execution needed to realize the big payoffs initially hyped by cloud vendors.
I found it interesting that just 1% of those surveyed say cloud computing is not part of their company’s business strategy. And over half of survey respondents to a previous 2012 survey said they planned to make heavy investments in cloud by 2015. That’s simply a lot of focus on moving core business processes over to the cloud.
As you consider your cloud strategies, consider at the same time your mobile strategy. As you build and deploy mobile apps, you may be building them with cloud based development tools like SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services (HCPms) or you may be thinking about how to manage and secure them with SAP Mobile Secure in the cloud.
The cloud brings some great opportunities to any company going mobile and concerned about security – especially SAP customers. SAP Mobile Secure presents a full Enterprise Mobility Management suite in the cloud – helping you manage and secure your mobile apps, devices and content in an extremely integrated and easy way. But we’re not like any EMM vendor with our cloud solution. We have the ability to add on a lot of great functionality that makes it easier for SAP customers to go mobile. For example, our enterprise app store is a great way to deploy all of your SAP and non-SAP apps to employees, partners and customers. And our mobile app configuration service helps you quickly customize and deploy apps – all in the cloud. And our mobile app discovery service simplifies the experience for your users who can rely on us to detect and configure apps for you. All of these innovations in the cloud are transforming how SAP can mobilize your business.
SAP Mobile Secure helps you runs simple – and the cloud helps us do it. Any users – including employees whose devices you own and contractors whose devices you don’t own – have access to an enterprise app store to download apps and configure services the way they need them.
You can check out our free cloud based trial of SAP Mobile Secure and see how any enterprise can take advantage of the cloud for mobile security. The suite is available for a 30-day trial here.
