Peter Firstbrook

IT organizations (ITOs) are struggling to constrain the use of employee-owned mobile devices for work activity. On the one hand, the business benefits from increased productivity and employee satisfaction without a commensurate cost. On the other hand, organizations lose control of corporate data and set themselves up for higher transition costs later. How can organizations reap the business benefit of mobility without the loss of control?

Profit-motivated threats such as identity theft and spyware will dominate in 2005+, motivating antivirus vendors to expand detection and repair capability. Rapidly spreading worms and numerous new vulnerabilities and patches will continue to plague organizations that lack automated response procedures through 2008. Largely effective spam-filtering strategies will expand to cover wireless devices and instant messaging in 2005.

As users wait for the mythical "free and unlimited bandwidth" promised by utopian press reports, they face difficult choices on how to optimize increasingly congested wide-area network (WAN) bandwidth, given increasing demand and budget cutbacks.

Users are failing to actively manage their cellular expenses and are missing opportunities for savings. A new crop of tools and professional services vendors is emerging to make the tedious task of managing and optimizing cellular usage less onerous.