The Rise and Rise of BYOD
 |
| Amazon Kindle V Apple iPad |
As the festive and gift season approaches, our favourite consumer technology vendors are gearing up to release a range of new gadgets and consumer devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod for instance have dominated many a wish lists and gift lists for the past years. And Apple competitors are not far behind with Google, Samsung and lately Amazon with Kindle trying to steal the market share from Apple in this lucrative and ever-increasing consumer technology segment. This year in particular the tablet segment is abuzz with not one not two but three high-profile product launches just weeks ahead of the festive season. Apple iPad mini, Amazon’s new Kindle and the eagerly anticipated Microsoft tablet, all are slated to make blockbuster debut and coming after our share of gift season wallet.
 |
| Apple iPhone V Samsung S3 |
And many of us, technology geeks or not are eagerly awaiting release and availability of such devices along with new smartphone models from Samsung’s new small S3 and Apple’s new big iPhone 5. But not everyone is happy with this onslaught of new consumer technology devices. And its not just the print media who is worried about losing yet another batch of potential traditional readers to these new breed of ebook and emagazine readers. A couple of my CIO and CTO friends who look after a large number of IT users for instance, are not particularly happy at these developments and the new flood of such devices. Why? The answer is simple….the rise and rise of the phenomenon called BYOD!
The rise of bring your own device (BYOD) programs is the single most radical shift in the economics of client computing for business since PCs invaded the workplace, according to Gartner. So really what is BYOD? Gartner defines BYOD as an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and other users to use personally selected and purchased client devices to execute enterprise applications and access data. For most organizations, the program is currently limited to smartphones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs and may include subsidies for equipment or service fees.
A recent survey of 578 senior-level executives commissioned by Cisco found that despite concerns from corporate officials, companies increasingly are allowing, in varying degrees, employees to use their own mobile devices – in particular, smartphones and tablets – in the workplace, and to access the corporate network and data. “Overall, the results found that although many executives are uneasy about the security of corporate information on mobile devices, the trend is largely unstoppable and proper policies must be initiated to underpin access to this sensitive information,” Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s newly promoted senior vice president of worldwide sales, wrote in an 10 October post on Cisco’s blog.
 |
| Tablets are fast becoming media consumers |
The rise of smartphones and, more recently, tablets – fueled by Apple’s wildly popular iPad – have been the key drivers in the BYOD trend, where rather than accepting company-issued technology, workers have pushed to use their own devices for work. Cisco and a host of other vendors have for more than a year been rolling out solutions designed to make it easier for businesses to identify and manage employee-owned devices on the network, and to secure the companies’ information.
According to the Cisco survey, conducted last month by Economist Intelligence Unit, most executives are uneasy about their companies’ mobile data-access policies, and while 42 percent said that C-level executives need secure and timely access to strategic data, only 28 percent said it’s appropriate to access this information from mobile devices. Forty-nine percent said that the complexity of securing so many different devices and a lack of knowledge about the security and risks involved with mobile access are top challenges for their firms.
This trend is set to grow exponentially next year – whether businesses actively manage it or not, according to a latest industry report published in IT Business Canada. Two-thirds of businesses already are seen some form of BYOD phenomenon in their office, but just one in four have actively created a policy that allows for consumer devices to be used in the workplace. The report quotes the findings of an Info-Tech Indaba survey sponsored by Telus Corp. This could cause problems raising security issues and complicating IT environments with multiple devices and operating systems. For 2013, the most popular technology for BYOD efforts is smartphones with 72 per cent of firms expressing at least some interest, according to Info-Tech. The next most popular is tablets with 64 per cent of businesses expressing interest, and then laptops with 59 per cent showing interest.
As a recent CIO article has articulated, the best practice seems to be to centralize the purchase and deployment of tablets and smartphones. In addition to simplifying device management, this strategy gave the companies more leverage with their preferred carriers. When individual employees paid their monthly phone bills and submitted them on expense reports, the companies had no clout to negotiate with. When all the monthly bills were rolled into one, they got lower rates. As Gartner suggests IT’s best strategy to deal with the rise of BYOD is to address it with a combination of policy, software, infrastructure controls and education in the near term; and with application management and appropriate cloud services in the longer term. Policies must be built in conjunction with legal and HR departments for the tax, labor, corporate liability and employee privacy implications.
