Right now, I would suggest that reduced staffing levels -- combined with increased need for information security diligence and business agility/flexibility -- are serving to contribute to service delivery challenges for many enterprises.

Yes, agility is required to deal with ongoing business changes. However, this type of flexibility also highlights a need for greater staff training, and overall team planning.

Imagine that you are running an auto mechanics shop, and over time, you steadily shrink your team down to the size of a racing pit crew in order to better manage costs, etc. Well, a successful pit crew is not just a small number of people who care for automobiles in quick bursts. There's a lot more to it.

The speed and coordination that they exhibit under pressure doesn't just come together automatically. This is something that businesses need to consider as they progress to having less people doing more things.

It is somewhat ironic that we continue to increase our redundancy of technology to ensure uptime, while lowering our redundancy of people, when people are so much more critical to the success of a business than technology is...

Paul Korzeniowski

Blogger, Freelance Writer

Posted on July 12, 2011

Mobility has become the watchword in today’s business. Employees are no longer shackled to a desk from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. They are up and about, collaborating with teammates, consulting with customers, and corroborating with partners. To complete these tasks, they need immediate access to corporate information. Providing them with this ability while ensuring that corporate data is not compromised is a daunting challenge for IT managers.

The reality is that employees are working with a raft of new mobile devices. Smartphones, like the Apple Iphone, and tablets based on Google’s Android system. These cool devices are easy to use and provide them with quick access to data, but they create a couple of problems.

In many cases, they devices are cheap and non-obtrusive enough so employees go buy them without consulting with the IT department. In many cases, company data housed on mobile devices walks out the door every day. Since IT isn’t aware of employees using these devices, no security checks are in place, and the potential risk is gigantic.

Even when IT departments try to secure mobile information, they face some challenges. The vendors built these systems to attract consumers, not business users. Enterprise level security functions were not designed into the system, so there are some holes, sometimes gaping one. We saw that with the first few Apple iPhones; great handy dandy devices, but not very secure. Mobile security issues are keeping many IT managers up at a night.