Beyond the hype: New developments in BYOD and the cloud

 

This is an interesting time to be in corporate IT. The booming consumer technology market is starting to flood into the corporate space – and along with it comes a whole heap of problems and challenges. New buzzwords are starting to dominate marketing materials and new products are touted as answers to these challenges.

Two to consider in greater depth are bring your own device (BYOD) and the cloud. They have been around for some time, but I think they will emerge from the hype and will now start to make a difference in legal IT.

BYOD

The consumer market in technology has accelerated way past the corporate world over the past few years, thanks largely to Apple and its iPhone and iPad. No longer are lawyers happy with standard BlackBerrys and plain old corporate laptops.

The challenge for legal IT (and in fact any corporate IT department) is that people now want the simplicity and ?flexibility they have at home to be available in the office ?– and in a device that looks good. Law firm board members now want their papers on their iPads, rather than stapled together in their briefcases.

For the IT department, which could historically control the computers it looked after and, more importantly, could control and secure the data on those computers, the flexibility and loss of control on personal devices is a big worry.

However, it will be a very brave IT department that continues to stand by the old ways and refuses to allow their end users the ability to bring in and use their own tablets or smartphones, not least because they’ll go and do it anyway!

So how do you maintain control and security of the firm’s data? It depends on the device; each one will have a different requirement for how the data is used.

On the one side is the smartphone, which is built around the ‘app’. At the other is the traditional PC, with its desktop integration. The tablet fits in the middle, as it can be used for both (see Figure 1).

Securing data on these devices can therefore be ?about securing the ‘app’, right through to providing a secure way to access the firm’s desktop on the device. This is ?a fast-moving space at the moment, but some of the key players that provide solutions to manage this are: Citrix, Mobile Iron, Good Technologies and the new BlackBerry Fusion application.

These solutions offer ways to control the devices that you allow to access your corporate networks. They can allow you to control the apps and services on those devices, auto configure things like WiFi and email, allow you to control and wipe data and apps selectively, and even provide white lists (and black lists) of apps you can install on the devices. They are designed to allow you to keep the firm’s data separate from the user’s personal data.

Effectively, these solutions are bringing the control and security the BlackBerry gave to corporate IT departments to a variety of devices. They also aim to retain control of data that belongs to the firm, while allowing the device as a whole to be freely used as a personal device.

So, what happens to BlackBerrys in the legal arena then? BlackBerry (previously known as Research in Motion) has just launched a new version of the device, which comes with some new features to assist in this personal/corporate split.

BlackBerry 10

BlackBerry 10 or BBX is the new operating system for ?the good old BlackBerry device and it brings with it ‘BlackBerry Balance’. This is a feature that lets you toggle between two profiles on the smartphone: a personal profile and a work profile. It allows corporate policies and controls ?to be placed on the work profile, yet leaves the personal profile more open.

It will be interesting to see how the new BlackBerry fares in a crowded smartphone market, especially as the BYOD solutions (including its own BlackBerry Fusion solution) mentioned previously allow the control of data across a wider range of devices on the other three platforms (Apple, Android and Windows Phone). Even security-conscious government departments have cleared the iPhone: CESG, GCHQ’s data security arm, cleared the iPhone for Level 3 data (that data deemed restricted) in late 2012.

Another emerging area in the BYOD space is around tablets. We all know how phenomenally popular the iPad has been and how it has seen off some rivals (notably the BlackBerry Playbook), but this year I think will see the rise of ?a couple of challengers. On one side are the Android tablets, led currently by the successful Nexus 7. As the year goes ?on, there will likely be competition from tablets with the Windows 8 platform.

Windows 8

It’s still early days for Windows 8 and it’s fair to say early impressions of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet device have been mixed. I think a lot of the negative reviews have come from confusion over the way the software runs in either the ‘desktop’ version or as an ‘app’. Once you understand this, it makes perfect sense why there are two versions of the surface tablet (the RT and the ‘Pro’ versions) and helps with understanding where the roadmap is leading.

The desktop world can be easily explained as the way ?every piece of software runs that you currently have on your Windows 7 desktop. So Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, iTunes, and so on, are all desktop software. Microsoft ?supports this world in Windows 8. However, the desktop is now tucked away below a new ‘desktop tile’ on the start screen. You can pin a tile for Word to the start screen, but launch it and it opens in that desktop space. So, the desktop ?as you know it from the Windows 7 world is effectively a ?layer below this new start screen.

New in Windows 8 though is a development platform, which is where the ‘apps’ come in. Adobe may create the next version of Photoshop as an ‘app’, and you launch it in the same way from a tile on the start screen, but this time it doesn’t switch into the desktop environment to run. It just runs the ‘app’, basically like your iPad or iPhone does.

The ‘desktop’ world still requires you to install the software in the same old way; the ‘app’ world, though, transitions the software into an AppStore (Windows Store). For now, most of the legal IT world consists of desktop software and, until vendors start to build ‘app’ versions of their software, it may be best to stick with Windows 7. (The shift has started though: OpenText already provides a Windows 8 app to access its document management system.)

The Surface RT tablet will just run the ‘apps’, it won’t run the ‘desktop’ software. To run those, you will need a Surface Pro tablet, which is due to be released soon.

Why the split? Well, the RT kit has different hardware under the bonnet and is designed to need much less power, hence much longer battery life (think iPad rather than laptop battery life).

The flexibility of this RT/Pro environment could be of huge benefit to lawyers who travel a lot, as with ‘Pro’ you have a true laptop replacement. You can use the device as a tablet with the apps and then connect a mouse and keyboard to use it as a desktop PC!

Microsoft has seen this potential and is launching new versions of its Office suite (Office 2013). These are the usually fully-featured versions of Word and Excel for when in desktop mode, but they also have a new ‘finger friendly’ interface so that, when in tablet mode, you can still use your email or read a document with ease.

One interesting feature of Office 2013 is the shift to the cloud. This seems a nod to the consumer world and allows you to store your documents in the cloud to allow access wherever you have an internet connection.

So, Word, for example, no longer has the hard drive (C: drive) front and centre; instead, you will see SkyDrive when clicking on ‘file’ and ‘open’ within Word. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s DropBox or Google Drive for storing your documents in the cloud.

Cloud data

It’s strange to see SkyDrive in the mix, as traditionally Office has been a corporate product rather than a consumer one and I can’t really see firms being too happy about their documents being hosted (who knows where) in Microsoft’s cloud. However, this is more about the concept that Office is bringing: that your documents can be available anywhere you have an internet connection.

Most law firms have had an internal document ‘cloud’ for some time in their document management systems, but this has only been available if you were on your firm’s network. There is now a big scramble in legal IT to provide a corporate cloud that is externally accessible.

A number of vendors are looking to exploit their technologies that are already on the desktops of lawyers to add functionality to their products that allows users to load documents into the cloud. This would allow lawyers to access files on their own devices and also give their clients direct access to the documents.

Workshare’s recent merger with SkyDox well and truly puts it in this space as it looks to leverage its Workshare Professional product to help collaboration with clients in the cloud.

HP Autonomy is also looking to exploit its ubiquitous document management system to enable synchronisation with a DropBox-type solution that would be available on clients and lawyers’ own devices. Netdocuments, having always being in the cloud, is well placed in this space too.

These are just a few vendors to look at for solutions in this space. I’m sure that a wander around the vendor hall at the Legal IT Show will unearth many more!

Jason Plant is the applications manager at international ?law firm DLA Piper (www.dlapiper.com) and blogs at ?www.jasonplant.co.uk

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