How do tablets fit into your business?

Quocirca's advice is to try and abstract away from the device itself as much as possible.

"If the last few years have shown anything, it's that there will be continued change, so trying to keep up with the number of new operating systems and devices coming to market is not a workable solution," explained Longbottom.

"However, looking to abstract the actual work environment away from the device through using virtualisation provides total control over the work side of things all data can still reside within the corporate data centre, users can be prevented from cutting and pasting or even printing if required."

It will be increasingly difficult for any organisation to try and dictate what a user can and can't use.

"If necessary, the virtual sandbox can be streamed to the device so that a user has a degree of disconnected use. Through such means, the user can carry on using the device for their personal life and even if it gets infected with a virus, it will have no impact on the work side of things. Even if they lose the device, there will be no work data held on it, so device security is not an issue."

Longbottom concluded: "It will be increasingly difficult for any organisation to try and dictate what a user can and can't use the PlayBook may be more of a business device but if the individual doesn't like the device or doesn't feel that they can get the personal apps that they want, they'll just go out and buy what they want and just expect that it will work with the business environment."

"As such, Quocirca does not advise that any organisation should be looking at a formal plan to introduce any specific tablet device it should be looking at how it manages its intellectual property across its total value chain which will include an individual's devices including those across contractors, consultants, customers and suppliers."

This means applying security to the data and documents, not to the devices something the PlayBook can certainly do without any input from the IT department.