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Field of View
Sometimes it makes sense to follow trends, themes and patterns of behavior outside of your normal business lens. Often great insights are borne from widening your field of view.
One of Qlik’s strategic technology partners, BlackBerry, invests a lot of effort in understanding the ever-evolving cyber security threat-scape, ensuring that their security software platform is certified to the very highest levels. If you want to read more on this topic, then feel free to check out their certifications: https://uk.blackberry.com/company/certifications
Suffice to say they rank #1 in security and BlackBerry is trusted by governments and enterprises worldwide, and Gartner recognise BlackBerry as the number 1 choice for regulated and security conscious organizations. What they don’t know about security is not worth knowing, so it pays to listen. I recently had the pleasure of attending their global Security Summit in New York, and BlackBerry is in the business of securing all end-points, whether field or IoT sensors, automotive security modules as vehicles get ever more complex, and finally the more obvious end points such as the mobile device in your pocket right now.
At the end of 2017, we also had the pleasure of hosting Mark Wilson, BlackBerry’s CMO at one of our customer events in San Francisco, and his presentation was extremely well received. BlackBerry is a technology partner of Qlik, but also a long-standing customer of note. They have deployed over 100 Qlik dashboards in their business, with an early decision to focus their efforts on operational analytics, to help drive and improve business efficiencies.
But the most fascinating use case that Mark shared during his presentation is called SIRT Vulnerabilities. SIRT stands for “Security Incident Response Team”, in effect a team made up of security experts that constantly monitor global security vulnerabilities. All SIRT data ingested is processed into Qlik as a presentation and analytics solution. SIRT Qlik reporting provides customers with the guidance and tools they need to protect their systems and devices, and monitors the security threatscape, providing rapid response dashboards presenting emerging incidents, incident tracking and remediation metrics. Aggregated data from Qlik is also used to provide regular monthly security bulletins to the online knowledgebase.
The data and knowledge gained over time by BlackBerry and their security experts is priceless. What is most fascinating is what these insights can tell us, and how spotting trends can help guide our business decision making in quite an unusual way.
Mobile App Market maturity
Firstly, let’s take a view from Gartner on Mobile applications, to get a feel for market direction backed up with some empirical evidence. In Gartner predicts 2017, Mobile Apps and Their Development1 Gartner state that, “Application leaders must embrace many new ways of interacting with mobile apps to keep consumers engaged as mobility becomes the gateway to digital business”. Following on from this, they present the short-range forecast that by 2022 over 70% of enterprise software interactions will occur on mobile. We are starting to see similar trends with the usage of Qlik software, again particularly on mobile devices as our customers are investing in digital transformation projects to evolve their business practices, surfacing insights at the point at which that decision is best made, often in the field, and increasingly often on a mobile device.
Gartner back up this digital transformation maturity in the market for Mobile apps in their report entitled The Mobile App development trends That Will Impact Your Enterprise in 20172. What is most fascinating in this report is not the results per se, more the swing in results over the two years since the previous report was published in 2015. Respondents were asked to answer the simple question, “in your opinion, what is the reason your most impactful mobile application has been so impactful to your organization’s success?” The response “data view and data visibility” continues to feature in the top 3 reasons, but there was a significant swing of note.
In the earlier report, “mobility and can be used anywhere” was the top response, but in 2017, the top response was “creates new business models, products, services and innovation”. Mobility Anywhere is now languishing in 8th place.
This tells us that the market for mobile business applications is maturing very fast. Having a look at some perspectives on Mobile BI as one of these valuable business apps is important too. As a sense check on this topic Dresner, back in 2015 in their BI Market Study3 reported that “…70% of businesses now feel ready to push Mobile BI out to their workforce.”. And finally, Gartner in the MQ 2017 report for EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management) Suites4 report that “Companies who embrace mobility and work to secure it now will pave the way in their industry moving forward. Others may be left behind.”
Cyber Security
Whilst these analyst viewpoints present insight over direction and should be given due consideration in terms of how your organisation transforms and potentially adopts mobile application usage and mobile BI, I want to now share a disturbing validation point that proves that this is where the action is, and absolutely what your “best” competitor is likely already doing.
Source: 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report
Hackers are winning, it’s an irrefutable truth. To date, the volume of security breaches has risen year over year, and shows no sign of abating. Breaches per security threat per category show that hacking is the number 1 security issue within our organizations.
But it’s where the battle ground lies that is most fascinating. Individual users and their devices are being hacked with rapidly increasing frequency. So much so that user devices are the major hacking threat organizations are now battling with.
Source: 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report
This trend is obvious when you think about how many mobile devices are being born each year (circa 2 billion), and that many of these are finding their way into the workplace, and more and more organizations are opening up corporate services to these devices.
Leverage the trend, securely
Of course, there are ways to protect and secure these devices. In fact, all mobile devices in the work place, whether BYO (Bring Your Own) or Corporate Owned can be secured and then leveraged for mobile business use cases beyond “just” email, calendars and contact management. Qlik partners with the following leading Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendors:
- Microsoft InTune
- VMWare Workspace ONE (powered by AirWatch)
- BlackBerry UEM (BES and Dynamics)
- MobileIron
In each case Qlik Sense can be deployed securely, protected from cyber security threats, handle “data leakage prevention” (DLP), and remotely managed at “app” level. These MDM solutions are robust enough for major global governments and financial institutes to place their trust on, when the scenario is such that mobile end points must be connected and leveraging on-premise or cloud assets.
So, the solution presented is to acknowledge and manage the threatscape, and leverage secure ways to enhance the productivity of your roaming work force. If you and your business are serious about digital transformation, then when documenting user stories, journeys and business scenarios to increase your success, ignore the mobile worker at you peril!
I believe that Mobile BI is the gateway to digital business. Qlik Sense empowers your people to act on insights anywhere, anytime, delivering significant productivity gains, and the MDM vendors Qlik partners with provide absolute security assurance to underpin broad-scale mobile deployments.
Sources
1 Gartner predicts 2017, Mobile Apps and Their Development: https://www.gartner.com/document/3525665
2 The Mobile App development trends That Will Impact Your Enterprise in 2017: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3693117/survey-analysis-mobile-app-development
3 BI Market Study, 2015, Dresner: http://dresneradvisory.com/products/2016-wisdom-of-crowds-business-intelligence-market-study-report-...
4 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites, 2017: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3740018/magic-quadrant-enterprise-mobility-management
