A Successful BYOD Implementation Recipe

BYOD (Bring Your own Device ) is a huge paradigm shift. In a BYOD world, IT is no longer responsible for procuring hardware such as smartphones, laptops, tablets. Instead, employees are offered to purchase the computing device of their choice. This user-led movement is transforming enterprise workspaces by as 21st century employees need to work from anywhere, anytime, and on their devices of choice, it may be within and outside of the traditional corporate boundaries. BYOD is changing the traditional way of how technology is deployed and used. This means reduced IT costs, improved morale, and increased productivity.

PC and Non-PC Sales, 2011 (in mn)

As per a survey, end-users demanding to use personal tablet, smartphones, etc at work as they are familiar with the working of personal device and would extend their productivity.

Option to Work Anywhere, Anytime

BYOD provides flexibility for employees to respond to work requests outside of working hours. As employees have the option to work on any device, it improves operational efficiency and at the same time provides higher satisfaction level to employees with such flexible work options.
Employees feel very confident on working with tools and technologies, which they prefer and live with everyday. BYOD also helps reducing the IT cost. Since users bring their personal devices they understand the functioning of device at a greater detail and do not require much technical support from IT.

It promises substantial cost savings if employees are willing to bear the cost of purchasing (full/partial), maintaining, and upgrading the devices they use at work. Though BYOD deployment does require a one-time, upfront investment to create the support infrastructure, it can result in lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in the longer run.

Security to be Prime

This device-agnostic strategy represents a new approach to security that will require reordering of IT priorities, as virtualization shows major benefits in terms, server consolidation, energy efficiency, green IT, business continuity and much more.

Virtualization can efficiently lock down applications and their access, allowing IT to securely allow employee owned hardware to access network resources and also helps mitigate security risks from attacks such as malware.

Application virtualization and desktop virtualization, tied with network segmentation limits the nimpact of radius of attacks because the device is not directly working with application servers and business data. The device is viewing the network but is not actually interacting with the application.

The Cloud Benefit

Today, most of the companies are moving towards cloud technology, which allows organization to access the company applications, emails, and data from any PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone, through the internet. This means that your employees can access their work applications anywhere, any time on any device, be it official or personal, allowing them to bring these devices to the office is a natural progression.

A recent global survey of CIOs found that 28% of their workforce is currently using personal devices for work related tasks, and this percentage is expected to rise to 35% by mid-2013.

Mobile Application Management (MAM) has the capability to disable application access and remotely wipe corporate data from devices when employees leave the company or change job roles. MAM can also ensure that all the personal content (pictures, applications, songs, etc) is intact if their BYOD access is removed.

This is an important aspect when asking employees to use their own devices for business purposes. A careful balance between employee satisfaction and access to IT resources is critical.
Clearly, employee-owned devices have set off security alarms among decision makers. In a recent Gartner survey on the consumerization of mobile devices, when asked "Do you believe that the security currently applied to mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, used in your organization is adequate and would satisfy an auditor?", only 27% of US respondents believed their mobile security was adequate to pass an audit.
Still for all its promise, BYOD would be a disaster in the absence of a proper security strategy.

Aligning to Business Needs

Without proper alignment to business needs, IT will face many issues implementing the right level of technical support and enforcement of policies among users.

Increasingly, employees are bringing their personal devices into their office for personal use primarily but expect that device to connect them to the enterprise network and/or the internet for business function.

In July 2011, IDC released a study indicating that 40.7% of devices used by information workers to access business applications are ones they own themselves, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets. That was a 10-point jump from the previous year's study.

Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014. IT needs to evolve by adopting technology that can detect new devices and dynamically adapt the network security posture. It will improve network manageability and security, save IT staff time, increase employee productivity, and gain strategic business advantage.