Enterprise Mobility Summit 2014: BYOD? Very soon you may have to...

Companies looking to get out of hardware entirely, claims Moka 5's Kimber Spradlin

Many organisations are looking to completely dispense with corporate-owned client hardware and shift towards an almost complete bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model over the next decade, according to Kimber Spradlin, an information security specialist and senior director at security software company Moka 5.

"We have organisations come to us, saying that five years from now they don't want to make another end-user hardware purchase. They want to be out of the hardware management business entirely and just manage the life-cycle of the data, and protect the data and the corporate workspace," said Spradlin.

Speaking at Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2014, Spradlin said that the iPhone and iPad had shifted staff mindsets over IT - and that increasing numbers of companies were looking to take advantage of this.

"Five or 10 years ago, we talked in security about bring-your-own laptops and we all laughed. No one thought that would ever happen because users didn't want to pony up, to bear such an expense themselves. Then all of a sudden, the iPhone and iPad came along and users became adjusted to the idea of owning that device and carrying it from job to job," said Spradlin.

This coincides with a fundamental shift from managing devices towards managing the applications, data and corporate information, according to Dragan Pendic, chief security architect at drinks giant Diageo.

That means that organisations need to be better than ever at the old-fashioned practice of information management, said Pendic. "It means, how good you are at labelling and classifying data; how good you are at managing the lifecycle of information in your organisation. If you're bad in these areas, mobility will make things even worse," he said.

However, outside of the public sector, particularly the most tightly regulated disciplines, many organisations have been particularly poor at implementing the practices and processes required to underpin a robust information management strategy.

Indeed, for many in profit-making organisations, the grind of working out classification schemas and applying them has always been hard work.