The top 10 enterprise mobility stories of 2014

Apple vs Microsoft, the Fappening and the Snappening. Here's the year in mobile.

10 - Lenovo acquires Motorola from Google for $2.9bn

Lenovo bought Motorola from Google back in January, paying around $2.9bn in a deal that completed in October. While many commentators saw Google's purchase of Motorola as simply a means to protect Android's IP legacy, its new owners perhaps have rather more ambitious plans for the Moto brand, if this blog is anything to go by.

9 - Facebook acquires Oculus Rift

In a leftfield move, Facebook acquired nerd favourite 'virtual reality' headset the Occulus Rift in March, putting many crowdfunding backers' noses out of joint because they felt the start-up had simply taken their almost $2.5m in donations to fatten up for acquisition.

Mark Zuckerberg said the device would be used for "other experiences" after games, and the best guess then (and now) is that Facebook wanted the technology for some kind of wearables play in the future.

8 - Dixons and Carphone Warehouse merge to prepare for Internet of Things

Dixons chief executive Sebastian James said the deal would make the two companies "a leading force in retailing for a connected world". The merger has been interpreted in some quarters as being a clear sign that 2015 will be the year the IoT goes mainstream. We'll see.

7 - Apple iPhone still most popular enterprise mobile device, finds Computing research

While Apple's put a little more work into its enterprise offerings over the past year or so, particularly with regard to security, it still comes as somewhat a surprise how popular the iPhone is with business IT leaders.

But that's what Computing Research found in April, revealing that 58 per cent of UK CIOs would still choose Apple as their enterprise mobile platform of choice, compared with 41 per cent saying Microsoft and 37 per cent selecting Android. BlackBerry still managed 25 per cent, which was encouraging for the ailing Canadian firm.

But why iPhone? Well, it seems it's more because of what Android can't do than anything Apple can, with Alan Shields, strategy and architecture team leader and BYOD project lead for Cambridgeshire County Council, saying: "We've moved towards the Apple platform. The reason being that security is still an issue with Android, it being an open-source product, and therefore security issues are more prevalent with that in terms of the operating system and apps - the Google Play Store has had problems."

And with Android now potentially about to face its worse spate of malware yet, Google might want to focus a little harder on the OS's security in 2015.

The top 10 enterprise mobility stories of 2014

Apple vs Microsoft, the Fappening and the Snappening. Here's the year in mobile.

6 - Ofcom announces more mobile spectrum to be auctioned off in 2015

Ofcom chose November to announce that it will be auctioning off the 2.3GHz and 3.4GHz mobile spectrum ranges next year, which are currently under the control of the Ministry of Defence.

The regulator is planning to auction the spectrum in 38 lots of 5MHz, with bidders being able to request a minimum bid of four lots per band.

Ofcom claims that it has proposed a safeguard cap "to promote competition". The cap would limit operators' mobile spectrum holdings to 37 per cent of relevant spectrum, and this would include the newly-auctioned spectrum.

Philip Marnick, Ofcom spectrum group director, said that more spectrum is needed to keep up with the demand for mobile data services. "Today marks an important step in ensuring that the UK has sufficient spectrum to support our wireless economy."

5 - Microsoft announces Office for iPad

Satya Nadella - in his first public appearance as newly-minted CEO of Microsoft - popped up in March to announce that Office was going to iPad. This would prove to be the beginning of a new direction for the company which has seen it try to reposition Windows - perhaps even the entire company - as a platform rather than a hermetically sealed 'way of doing things'.

"Cloud first, mobile first" has become a bit of a cliché in the time since, perhaps, but there's no denying that Redmond seems to have done more right than wrong this year, on the whole.

4 - Surface Pro 3 turns out to be pretty good, actually

Somebody at Microsoft finally got it right, making the third iteration of the company's Surface hybrid tablet a decent piece of kit.

An aggressively iPad-shaped screen, an ultrabook-like i7 model, thinness, lightness and a fairly competitive price have made the machine a genuine rival to the Macbook Air, and a plausible laptop replacement.

Computing loved it, and we weren't the only ones - Kent council recently told us it's considering adopting 1,500 in the near future.

3 - Apple reveals the Apple Watch and Apple Pay

Apple's bullish September announcement that it would be waiting until 2015 to take over the wearables industry seemed a little smug, especially given the Apple Watch doesn't seem to bring anything particularly original to the wearables party.

But along with the smart watch announcement came the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and along with them, the long-awaited rollout of the Apple Pay digital wallet. While the new iPhones got a predictably ecstatic reception, the jury's still out for Apple Pay. Most major banks are on board, but large US retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart still aren't interested. One to watch out for in 2015, certainly.

The top 10 enterprise mobility stories of 2014

Apple vs Microsoft, the Fappening and the Snappening. Here's the year in mobile.

2 - NSA collected 200 million texts a day, including those of Britons

Edward Snowden started the year by spilling more confidential beans - this time that the NSA had collected and stored 200 million text messages from mobile phone users across the entire world, regardless of whether they were suspected of criminal activity or not.

The programme was codenamed Dishfire, and Snowden revealed that intercepting this information had been common practice until at least 2012.

As well as texts, ordinary citizens - including many UK residents - were also having their phone activity logged, including every phone number they may have called while being monitored. The information was, of course, passed to GCHQ.

1- "The Fappening" and "The Snappening" teaches us a thing or two about trusting public clouds

Apple's public cloud service, iCloud, and consumer app SnapChat suffered hacks in August and September that will undoubtedly go down in history as some of the most high-profile ever. This is largely because the content leaked onto various servers around the world included naked pictures of Hollywood celebrities such as Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. The debacle reignited a debate that began in earnest after Dropbox lost control of its passwords and PSN got its user account details hacked, namely 'can we trust public clouds anymore?'. This issue will become even more pressing as companies such as Apple, with its HealthKit platform, look to store highly sensitive medical information in the cloud. This topic will only get hotter over the next 12 months.

As enterprises keep allowing (with or without the IT department's consent) public clouds to become a part of their IT infrastructure, it's becoming increasingly important to either wise up around their use, or start finding alternatives that end users will want to adopt.