As the consumerisation of IT continues to affect companies across all types of industries, more and more companies are contemplating a BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device” policy.
In Australia, 46% of the population now own a Smartphone, up from 36% in 2010 which is expected to reach 60% in the next 12 months.
Smartphones and tablets are proving to be more than a consumer phenomenon, which is resulting in the lines between work and play blurring. Consumers are also employees and businesspeople who don't want to have to carry around two separate smartphones (personal and company issued) for personal and professional use. IT departments are increasingly being approached by C-level executives looking to integrate these new technologies and extend email, contacts and other business systems to their personal device of choice.
Companies are seeing a plethora of smartphones and tablets that their employees are bringing into the business. There are many benefits to delivering a BYOD policy in your business. Companies get to keep their workforce happy and lower their costs. Employees get to choose the smartphone that is right for them, and companies get to save on expensive hardware and training costs because their employees are already comfortable using their chosen device.
On the flip side, the challenge faced by IT departments is how do they support so many different devices, with so many different operating systems and versions?
To be successful, IT departments must respond by finding a way to manage the ever changing landscape of consumer devices. However, there are fundamental differences between what IT wants and employees want, which can complicate matters.
Employees want freedom and IT wants control.
Employees want fast, simple, self-service access to their business systems from any device they choose. IT wants complete control over security, performance and user experience.
The concept of BYOD is exciting and innovative, but it comes with technical challenges and considerations.
From a business perspective, companies must consider the financial, legal, implementation and support elements of a BYOD policy.
On the technical side of BYOD, IT and security teams need to understand, plan and implement a solution that adheres to existing policies and compliance requirements. A main consideration here is how to partition personal and business data on the same device. If an employee leaves your company, how do you ensure you wipe all corporate data and access, whilst leaving the integrity of their personal data?
There are a growing number of companies now offering intelligent platforms to manage, maintain, support and secure smartphones and tablets. In Australia, the leading companies for Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms are AirWatch and Mobile Iron.
As mentioned, BYOD is also about extending access to your corporate applications to any device. Enabling a mobile workforce increases overall productivity by allowing employees to remain connected to work even while away from the workplace. It can improve decision making processes, streamline existing work processes and improve customer satisfaction by responding quickly to clients requirements face to face.
What was once a costly an onerous task of writing applications in the code of each device language, is now a much more simpler matter of choosing the right platform for your business to build applications once and deliver it cross platform.
Again, there are a growing number of companies offering a platform approach to mobile application development. These include Pyxis Mobile, Titanium and PhoneGap.
The concept of BYOD is gaining traction quickly in many organisations overseas. In the United States, according to data from Aberdeen Group (via ZDNet), about 75% of enterprises now have some component of "bring your own device" policies in place.
Accepting and supporting multiple smartphones and tablets, extending business systems to mobile devices and planning your BYOD policy, is no longer a distant consideration for many companies, it is fast becoming inevitable.
Have you started planning your strategies?
As well as selecting an MDM to support BYOD enterprise need to consider what they are trying to manage. MDM's currently fit into 2 camps. 1 that is focused on managing the device (Mobile Iron and AirWatch and the other that is focused on securing the device (McAfee EMM and Good for example).
ReplyDeleteeg: What good is a restricted app list feature (Mobile Iron and AirWatch offer this) without the ability to auto update it? Are you going to have someone enter all the newly discovered Malware apps into the blacklist every day? McAfee are currently in the process of including this type of service into their daily DAT update.
Food for thought.