People looking at mobile phones

You know you work for a tech PR agency when you read an article that projects the number of Android devices that Google will activate this year and your first reaction is: Client X can help prepare for this! At March, we are constantly reading up on all of the tech world’s emerging trends, and we’re quite good at recognizing positive momentum when we see it. Even so, the 900 million Android devices expected to be activated this year made me do a double-take.

According to CRN, last week at the Google I/O 2013 conference, it was revealed that more than 500 million Android smartphones and tablets were activated throughout 2011 and 2012. Since then, Sundar Pichai, head of Google’s Android and Chrome operations, says that the momentum has been “breathtaking.” Hugo Barra, vice president of product management, agreed, noting that Google play received 2.5 billion installations just last month. While this is certainly big news for Google, the obvious question is: how will this impact the technology market as a whole?

Security and the Mobile Workforce

With the workforce becoming more mobile (archive), enterprises must be able to deliver secure remote access to their employees – or at least that’s one point of view. The other side of the coin is that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) has been giving CIOs headaches for the past couple of years now, and as of just a few months ago, only 24 percent of companies had implemented a BYOD policy. Put that statistic next to the ever-present media scrutiny around Android’s susceptibility to malware, and the security concern becomes hard to miss. Given that the Android platform is now the most widely used mobile operating system (OS), enterprises will need comprehensive security solutions specific to that OS.

Not seeing the PR connection? Imagine the damage that could be done to a client’s reputation if their corporate network were to fall victim to a malware attack. That wouldn’t instill a great deal of confidence in customers regarding the security of their sensitive and private information.  Establishing a BYOD policy and implementing a holistic remote access solution significantly reduces the likelihood of such an attack, and can save companies’ expenses and reputations; in other words, an important strategy that can’t be overlooked in crisis communications, something that public relations agencies have started to incorporate more often in their services.

Security, however, is but one aspect to consider when examining the impact of this massive Android device activation. Next week, I’ll take a look at how communication service providers can use analytics capabilities to turn these activations into an opportunity to better connect with their customers.

 


This post was first published by Mike Griffin on March Communications’ blog PR Nonsense.