Wearing your business apps – IoT’s place in the enterprise

It’s time to place your bets on what was the first ever piece of wearable tech. Ready?

Google glass? No. The Apple Watch? Wrong again. How about Dr. Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera? Close, but no cigar. The answer dates back to the 17^th-Century, when Chinese mathematicians transferred the trusty abacus onto a ring.

We’ll admit that the ‘tech’ side of this particular invention is up for debate, but the idea of getting our accessories to help our day-to-day activities has been around for much longer than we might think.

Another step beyond mobile working, wearable tech aims to operate silently in the background. While virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are beginning to make a breakthrough, we’re currently able to kit ourselves out fairly well with wearable tech. Google Glass takes many of the core functionalities of your smartphone – GPS, messaging and emails, translation – and puts them right before your very eyes. And for those that don’t like wearing glasses, Samsung has even patented a ‘smart’ contact lens. Recent research saw Apple responsible for two-thirds of all smart watch shipments in 2015, accounting for over 12,000,000 units – and Fitbit posted a new quarterly shipments record in Q4 last year. It seems that “software increasingly belongs on the wrist, and this is the direction the market is going.”

 

So what can we expect of wearable tech to come? Well, for one, it might not be entirely wearable… Ingestibles may be the next step for keeping track of your vitals, and could tell you when you last took your medication. ‘Embeddables’ and ‘invisibles’ are designed to capture vital data through your skin; the former are inserted into muscles, skin or nerves while the latter are ‘stick-on tech’ like a skin colored patch or tattoo-like sensor.

In 5 years’ time, we might all be calling friends on our watches, following directions through our contact lenses while dressed in connected outfits. But what about wearables and the Internet of Things when it comes to enterprise?

The shift to the enterprise

A 2015 Forrester report found that 51% of tech & business leaders identify wearables as a critical, high, or moderate priority for their organization. The same report states three core factors that are driving wearable computing into the enterprise:

• The connected world: sensors, networks, and analytical software to connect physical objects to computer systems.
• Predictive analytics: Software/hardware solutions that allow businesses to analyze big data sources to deploy predictive models and improve performance.
• The mobile mind shift: The expectation of attaining desired information at any time, on any device at a person’s moment of need.

These three factors make the case for enterprise wearables, and perhaps the Internet of Things in general, a more reasoned one. Smartphones in particular have raised our want and need for a constant stream of information and knowledge, and yet are still restricted in some aspects. While it’s true that mobile devices have made considerable progress on the ease of access to content and data, it becomes a different story entirely with something that is physically attached to your body. Forrester believe that in 5 years’ time, the market for company-provided wearables will be larger than the consumer market.

The new wave of BYOD

It might not be right around the corner, but companies will soon need to embrace these connected devices the same way they did with smartphones and tablets. It involves ensuring you have the right policy controls to support wearables, as to increase employee productivity without putting sensitive enterprise data at risk. Devices such as smart watches are designed to be on you at all times, but smaller devices have more of a tendency to get lost. For this reason, it’s vital that your company employs strong user authentication that is able to secure data on a device if it happens to fall into the wrong hands. The following are 5 steps to consider when dealing with wearable enterprise technology:

1.   Sensitive data

When mobilizing your data it will help to know which content is sensitive and which isn’t. Most companies (we hope!) already have policies for categorizing sensitive data, but this may change as it is mapped to new technology. So, make sure you’re fully up-to-date with you company policies before you begin.

2.   Security policies

It helps to view wearables as an extension of your overall mobility strategy. Smart watches, for example, are largely extensions of smartphones, so it’s important to analyze how well your existing smartphone data protection policies will apply to smart watch usage. You may need to make some adjustments to current policies as not to impact employee productivity.

3.   Profile your users

Most companies will employ varying levels of access to content for employees on mobile devices, and the case should be the same for wearables. Leaking data to outside vendors could result in huge problems, so you need fine-grained control.

4.   Protect the device data

Separating corporate data from personal data is a key aspect to your security policy, especially when devices like smart watches are even more personal than smartphones. As such, encryption used for sensitive, corporate data should be different from that used for personal data.

5.   Usability matters

If you can’t make your security measures usable, then employees will look for ways to work around it, and eventually find them. Wearables are sure to offer a new level of contextualized user experiences, with access to relevant information faster than ever before.

Wearable technology's impact – or at the least, future impact – on the enterprise world cannot be undervalued. IDC estimate the wearable tech market to react almost 112 million units by 2018, and this rapid growth will require companies to embrace the new wave of connected devices.

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