The Coming Integration Of Personal Cloud Services And Enterprise Apps

Personal cloud services such as Dropbox and Evernote seem like consumer-focused apps that CIOs should block from authorized workplace use. Currently, many CIOs believe that mobile devices and personal cloud services must ultimately be under full IT control, with device-level segregation of work and personal content. This report explains why a strategy of blocking personal cloud services and offering enterprise-grade alternatives will fall short. We review the motives of employees in bringing their own personal cloud services, just as they do devices, and how CIOs will find personal-enterprise integration a better choice than walling off personal cloud services. We show what IT will need to do to integrate employees' personal cloud services and data with core enterprise applications and which vendors have begun to support this. Ultimately, we predict that IT will create application programming interface (API)-style connections with employees' personal cloud services in a fashion similar to business-to-business (B2B) integration.