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As Australia moves into the new business year, enterprises will continue to rely on mobile technology to maintain continuity, productivity and connections, writes Kieran O’Connor from Jamf.
Who’d have thought it – that in 2022, we’d still be dealing with COVID? Keeping the economy ticking over, protecting the population and preventing children and young people being short-changed on the educational front are key priorities for governments, both state and federal.
Current events continue to highlight the critical importance of mobile digital technology for businesses and organisations of all stripes, as they strive to “keep calm and carry on” while infections within the community soar.
Against this backdrop, what high-tech trends and developments are we likely to see playing out in Australia this year? Here are a few.
Apple in the enterprise
In today’s times, it’s a fact that goes almost without saying: Hybrid and remote working are the new normal. Four in five organisations expect the practice to persist long term, according to research released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in April 2021.
Letting employees spend all or part of the week on the tools at home is fuelling another trend: the consumerisation of corporate ICT, among other things, which means more Apple in the enterprise, particularly in organisations with a preponderance of younger workers, whose natural predilection is for all things ‘i’. Although it won’t happen in a single year, it’s likely that within the decade, we will see iPads and MacBooks edging Windows-based devices out of pole position.
Striving for security
Many organisations have ramped up their cyber defences in the wake of an extraordinary onslaught of attacks across 2020 and 2021 but are these sufficiently strong? The Australian Cyber Security Centre received more than 67,500 cyber crime reports in the 2020-21 financial year. That’s an increase of around 13 per cent in the previous period. Self-reported losses from cyber crime totalled more than $33 billion, according to the agency, which has warned businesses and organisations to remain hyper-vigilant.
“The increasing frequency of cyber criminal activity is compounded by the increased complexity and sophistication of their operations. The accessibility of cyber crime services – such as ransomware as a service – via the dark web increasingly opens the market to a growing number of malicious actors without significant technical expertise and without significant financial investment,” the ACSC’s Annual Cyber Threat Report 2020-21 noted.
Without rigorously secured devices, remote working employees very often represent a weak link in the cyber security chain, with their user credentials at risk of compromise or theft. That’s why stringent, zero trust security regimes are likely to become even more popular this year, as organisations look to lock down off-site teams.
Digital and device-based learning on the rise
Computer technology has been a lifesaver for hundreds of Australian schools and tens of thousands of students during two years of COVID disruption. It’s highly likely it will remain an integral aspect of the teaching and learning experience, even if and when “normal service” resumes sometime later in the year.
The pandemic has been something of a story of digital haves and have nots, with schools fortunate enough to possess well-managed fleets of devices better able to pivot to remote learning mode than their less well prepared and resourced counterparts.
For the typical, sparsely resourced ICT department whose primary focus is on managing enterprise systems, securing and supporting hundreds of laptops remotely can be an extraordinary challenge and it’s one they’ll continue to grapple with over the next 12 months.
Investing in device management solutions for the post-COVID era
Robust, secure device management solutions can help organisations and their IT departments address the productivity, security and support challenges generated by a remote or hybrid working model. Designed to enable businesses to take control of their digital fleets, these solutions allow administrators to automate the business of configuring, updating, securing and managing multiple devices. With thousands of organisations looking to do exactly this in 2022, expect to see device management solutions rise up in the priority list of ICT investments.
Kieran O’Connor is the general manager, Australia and New Zealand at Jamf.
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