I have a sense that mobile e-mail devices are set to dramatically increase the amount of email flowing around business, especially internal e-mail as users find the convenience of devices and the flexibility of short messages preferable to voice calls or SMS. Computing magazine recently reported (19 June 2008) that mobile devices were responsible for a huge increase in email traffic at a large insurance  provider.

Two years ago I was regularly backing up 4GB of email data, last year this was 8GB, this year it is just over 17GB (double if you count the Mail Archiving) and getting to the point where regular backups are becoming impractical. We have already maxed out the available memory on our Exchange Server as it tries to handle the amount of traffic (though Spam is still a huge problem) and the prospect that this is set to grow may even point to the requirement for additional servers to balance the load.

During this time mobile device use has slowly increased on a varying array of devices including personal digital assistants and push devices including mobile phones, smart phones and email communicators. Smart phones in particular look set for an almost 50% increase in sales over the next year.

The effect of the increase in email usage is not just on the email itself, but also impacts on the archiving requirement, disk mirroring, bandwidth throughput, email analysis and security applications, communications and data tariffs, increased demands on processor and memory and increases in power and networking requirements.

Once email is embedded upon mobile devices and in the minds of users other applications will likely follow including Calendering, Task Management, Intranet, Voice over IP, remote desktop and office like applications. Demands for additional web services will also likely increase, especially as the popularity of widgets, such as those demonstrated on the Apple iPhone, become popular.

The complex task ahead for IT  is to plan the infrastructure to handle these demands and provide an effective infrastructure for a new breed of mobile employee. I have already discovered that different devices behave very differently and have unique and sometimes curious configuration issues. For example, devices handle a simple installation of certificate very differently and even their understanding of what a certificate is varies (Mobile ActiveSync and Microsoft Exchange 2007). Managing synchronisation and user expectations of data on these devices is also a problem that requires consideration, as too as to what happens should a device get mislaid.

Some of the challenges facing IT departments include:

• Back-End Infrastructure
• Bandwidth Considerations
• Security, Certificates and Trust issues
• Wireless roaming of mobile devices (do the users use public wireless hotspots, GPRS, 3G or their home/corporate wireless access points)
• Handling data tariffs with mobile operators
• Synchronisation of information between mobile data and non-mobile data
• Backup of information on mobile devices
• Standardising mobile applications
• Dealing with downloaded applications
• Legal Issues (e.g. downloading music or video on to company devices)
• Education and Re-Education of Users and IT Staff (for example a 20MB PDF may be great on a desktop machine but you are unlikely to want to send it over a GPRS connection)
• Device Platform
• Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, IPS
• Personal Device and Personal Use versus Corporate Device and Corporate Use
• Company Policies on use of mobile devices