Symantec Corp. has released the results of its 2012 State of Mobility survey, which revealed a global tipping point in mobility adoption.

“Everyone is adopting mobile devices, mobile applications, mobile computing and so from a security and information protection standpoint, we have a vested interest in understanding what are customers concerns and what their plans are,” said Evan Quinn, Senior Manager, Mobile Strategic Trends Marketing with Symantec, as to why Symantec conducted such a survey.

Among the key findings of the survey was that mobile devices are now seen as critical business tools. In fact, 71 percent of survey respondents noted they were discussing adopting custom mobile applications.

“Most organizations are looking to develop their own mobile apps for their own business purposes,” said Quinn. “We are the inflection point of what the next generation of applications are going to be and used for organizations.”

He added that the next generation of apps is going to be served by a cloud infrastructure and that some verticals such as banking and health care are ahead of the curve and are already offering mobile apps directly to their customers.

In addition, 59 percent of respondents were running line of business apps and 66 percent were discussing the use of corporate app stores.

“If you are a CISO or a CIO, you want to figure out what are the apps that you will support that are attached to the organizational network and how do you communicate what does apps are? A corporate app store would be an elegant way for somebody to get on their tablet or phone and take a look at all the things that are available [to them],” Quinn noted. “The Android Marketplace, the iOS App Store are examples on the consumer side and CIOs are going to say we ought to have something similar here inside the company.”

Quinn said that most organizations will seek third party vendors for their corporate app stores but will manage it themselves such as establishing policies.

In addition, Quinn believes there is going to be interests in corporate information stores that would work similar to how Intranets work today but more in the app store model where people would go there to get a particular piece of information or content.

Another finding of the survey found half of the respondents saying that mobile computing was somewhat to extremely challenging.

What is challenging for enterprise IT, said Quinn, is that mobile computing is a new model for them. In the past, IT departments had to only wrestle with one major platform shift at a time but today, they are dealing with two: mobile on client side and cloud on the server side.

“IT departments are being whip-sawed between these two major changes in the industry and any major platform change causes some unrest and people have to re-learn things and functions that used to work five years ago don’t really apply anymore,” he added. “Where the concerns come from is we used to manage PCs [one way] but now with mobile, we like to do the same thing but it is a little different. There are apps involved and no one ever brought their own PCs to work and even if they did, we wouldn’t let them on the corporate network. Now we are going to let mobile devices on the corporate network. There are a lot changes going on and I think that just causes a lack of comfort in IT.”

Respondents also listed security as one of their key IT priorities when it comes to mobile computing. Quinn advised that organizations should understand what the mobile threat landscape is from a security standpoint and how mobile threats are different when servers, the Internet and PCs come under attack.

As well, he recommended that people need to look at policies first before putting in any software that supports mobile security. “You want to understand from a company policy standpoint where you want to take mobile computing.”

In the end, Quinn advised that company’s come up with a three-year plan where Year One could be to support Apple and Android devices for e-mail only while Year Two could be implementing an app store and piloting mobile app development. He stressed that any mobile computing plans need to also take into consideration the business perspective.

The survey interviewed over 6000 organization across 43 countries including Canada and the United States, the UK and China.