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Work has gone mobile, and businesses large and small must now keep up with the growing number of devices used by their employees to get the job done. Maybe you’re a contractor keeping track of repair crews from a field office Mac, or a store owner with iPhone-enabled inventory runners. Or maybe you run a coffee shop using iPads to process sales.

There are many reasons you might want a mobile-enabled workforce, and a lot of ways to go about setting one up, but many of them are quite expensive.

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Let’s face it: Asking a person to carry around two devices all the time, one for work and one for play, is just inefficient. When organizations implement overbearing management or ignore privacy concerns, they almost force users to carry a device for work and a device for personal use.

While a few employees may enjoy the air-gap separation of church and state, most people buckle under the stress of having two separate devices to potentially forget in a cab or leave on the airport bathroom sink (true story!).

This post is brought to you by VMware AirWatch.

If you know what the word “containerization” means, you probably work in IT (or you’re tech-savvy and adventurous enough to run afoul of your IT department on a regular basis). Containerization is the method of securing a device for corporate use by putting a part of it behind some type of authentication — without managing the actual device.

It’s a common practice in the corporate world, especially for bring your own device (or BYOD) environments, because containerization is often viewed as more lightweight than mobile device management, aka MDM. Users also may assume that MDM is overly intrusive and that containerization is a good compromise.

However, many of these issues are already solved for iOS. By leveraging Apple’s built-in privacy protections, AirWatch allows IT departments to preserve the native device experience while protecting corporate data.

This post is brought to you by VMware, maker of AirWatch.

Whatever your organization’s mission, synchronizing all your employees’ mobile devices can power up your operations. However, wrangling together an array of phones, tablets and laptops is very tough. Making sure they’re all caught up and in sync with the same software versions and whatnot — let alone sourcing or (gasp) developing the applications your business will run on them — is a lot for a business of any size to take on.

If you’re running your business on Apple machines, it’s probably because you want to keep things clean and simple. But wrangling desktops, tablets, phones and the employees who use them isn’t as easy as syncing your calendar.

Emails, point-of-sale operations, apps, security settings — an enterprise of any size can quickly present a symphony of stresses that’s too much for any business owner to orchestrate.

2014 will go down as one of the biggest years in Apple history. The stock hit record highs. The company’s first wearable was revealed. And Apple dropped $3 billion on its biggest acquisition ever. But of all the huge news Apple dropped in the last 12 months, nothing is likely to have as big an impact as the previously unthinkable announcement that Apple and IBM buried the hatchet and partnered up.

The move was significant not only for the historic aspect of the two rival tech titans uniting, but also for how it will impact all of us in the workplace. In his final note of the year, top Apple analyst Horace Dediu dubbed the IBM partnership “the most significant technology news of 2014.”

That may sound ridiculous considering how much hype Apple Watch is getting ahead of its release, but Dediu points to the first wave of apps created by the partnership. These offer an early indication of just how transformative the relationship could be. For the first time, enterprise apps are being designed for their users (the employees) rather than their employers.

Just take a look at the difference between IBM’s new Expert Tech app compared to the closest equivalent from Oracle, and see which one you’d rather work with: