Technology has made March Madness madder than ever, giving the term a whole new meaning around the office. Especially with games tipping off between the hours of 9 and 5. According to a recent survey of 500 IT professionals (conducted by Braun Research), the NCAA college basketball tournament has been identified by 42% as a corporate network inhibitor. 37% reported slower speeds and 34% say the hoops tourny shut down their network for an extended period of time. It's easy to imagine how this is happening with employees streaming games from their work computers. The chances of your employees engaging in the same type of activity is relatively high. Bracketology, after all, can leave pride, money, and other unspeakables on the table.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) eliminates the need to install applications on the customer hardware. SaaS applications are typically accessed from a web browser and a single instance of the application often serves all the customers. Since the same application instance needs to fulfill different needs for different customers and there may be no option of creating a custom build for each customer, customizability of SaaS applications becomes an important aspect for delivering personalized software to the users. Customizability enables easy integration of the SaaS application with the customers existing systems and also empowers partners and resellers to easily configure the solution according to their and their customer’s requirements.

Did you know that around 45% of the mobile workforce has a job that is compatible with a certain amount of mobile commuting? Wow!

The enhanced access to information provided by greater use of smartphones and tablets among employees has created inherent data security risks.

Recently, the MaaS360 MDM solution achieved an important certification under the U.S. Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) by the GSA. Google and Salesforce.com are the only other cloud providers who have achieved this certification from the GSA. We've maintained our position as the pioneer in SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions for secure mobile device and app management. Now that we're a FISMA-certified company, we've become the preferred solution for many Federal agencies.

Last Thursday hundreds of people gathered around the ring to witness Apple's widely hailed iPad 2 take on the kindle fire, a contender on the rise in the tablet world (released on November 15th). It was a great day in tablet history and a dramatic fight until the very end. The fighters kept the crowd in it for the whole match and two lucky folks walked away with a free tablet of their own! Thanks to all who followed this event on Twitter (hashtag #maas360webinar). If you haven't had a chance, please share your thoughts about the webinar! For those who weren't in attendance I'll do my best to give a blow-by-blow account of each round, though I highly recommend you watch the official recording here.

Do your employees use smartphones at work? Do your employees access business resources from their devices with or without permission? Does your staff use social media services like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to do business or for recruiting talent? If the answer to any of the above questions is Yes, your organization is hit by the “Consumerization of IT” trend.

Just five years ago, probably even two, it was more than likely that the mobile phone you had for work was a BlackBerry smartphone from Research In Motion.