Mobility and the wrath o’God

There once was a time when people who talked about the weather were considered boring. Not Anymore. Weather (referred to in California as Wrath o’God) is a headline enterprise concern, over and over again. In a recent West Coast event, 3 million people in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico went dark for a day in early September, one of the hottest times of the year in those places. And this doesn’t factor in more routine phenomenon like earthquakes, firestorms, and mudslides. When these events occur, we’re talking no air conditioning, no traffic lights, no gas pumps, and perhaps more significantly, no cash registers. But guess what? A lot of folks still had cell service, and were able to continue working using mobile devices and cloud based infrastructure. Enterprise mobility architectures have a key role to play in maintaining business function during adverse events, and IT professionals who manage for availability will increasingly be looking to the cloud to spread risk in situations that could threaten business continuity.

It is admittedly simplistic, but a recent seven page PDF published by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Advertising Council provided a barebones template for a business continuity plan. It concerns itself with how an enterprise will preserve life, assets and business data. Realistically, however, to guarantee availability and continuity, it’s not enough to simply ensure that line-of-business apps and data will survive a disruption; mobility IT management infrastructure must also remain accessible and remain capable of running, provisioning and maintaining security of a mobile device network.

With business continuity on everyone’s mind, pairing mobile devices and cloud based infrastructure is a rising trend. This is now a core competency requirement for mobile technology managers and planners as well. Vendors are already consolidating and positioning to serve an emerging global market for hybrid and integrated cloud services. Recently, Verizon bought Massachusetts based CloudSwitch, a company whose technology offers enterprise an incremental path to the cloud or a means of operating a hybrid of in-house/cloud based architectures. Amazon, RightScale, Rackspace and others are jostling in the space, offering a variety of options worth evaluating. The important thing is to assess risks and plan ahead, because there doesn’t seem to be an acre of North America where there hasn’t been business continuity issues this year. And Hawaii has all of those volcanoes….