Prepare For Anywhere, Anytime, Any-Device Engagement With A Stateless Mobile Architecture

This report outlines Forrester's future look for mobile security and operations. We designed this report to help security and risk (S&R) and infrastructure and operations (I&O) executives understand and navigate the major business and IT trends that will affect the development of a future-proof mobile support strategy. Mobility holds the promise of fostering new innovations, reaching new audiences, and most importantly, creating never-before-seen user experiences and business opportunities. To stay ahead of constantly evolving mobile business requirements, S&R and I&O pros can't rely on the old approach of end-to-end control over the data path, device, and applications. Instead, they must embrace a "stateless" architecture where IT decouples security controls from the devices and the infrastructure, derives trust dynamically, and avoids costly new investment of in-house applications and infrastructure. A stateless architecture will engender big changes in IT operations and expectations of control, but the end result will be a coherent strategy that allows IT to provision services to any device dynamically but with the controls needed to operate safely and in compliance. In this report, we will outline four steps that S&R and I&O pros must follow to build a stateless architecture and to prepare for a future that supports anywhere, anytime, any-device engagement.