BYOD: Pushing the Corporate PC Out

The impact of consumerization is noticeably the highest in the area of access devices. As per a survey conducted by Wipro, 60% of the employee's use a smart phone at work while another 31% are willing to use these devices at work. Tablets and smartphones are pushing the corporate PC out. The rapid proliferation of these devices amongst consumers has led to turbocharging the move towards consumerization.
Employees are increasingly asking for their personal devices to be accommodated in the workplace. The concept of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is a manifestation of the trend of consumerization of IT. Organizations are various phases of evolving policies that support mobility and BYOD.

Philippe Winthrop, mobility analyst and founder of the Enterprise Mobility Forum says, "As the adoption of smartphones and tablets continues to grow both at the consumer and enterprise space, mobility is quickly transitioning to the second wave of mobility predicated on applications. The consumerization of enterprise mobility -most visibly manifested by the BYOD trend-has now moved on to the application front.
BYOD adoption ensures relevant RoI in a short time span. A Wipro study says that it helps an enterprise to lower the power consumption, resulting in up to 80% fall in electricity bills. WAN bandwidth can be optimized with various virtualization tools and adoption can help in saving 40% of the hardware costs.

Venkatesh Natarajan, special director, IT, Ashok Leyland. He says, "BYOD will definitely alter the IT procurement policies and by encouraging employees to bring their own devices will liberate the organization from the elaborate process of buying hardware. While this cannot be enterprise wide, but if a good section of employees brings in their own devices, it does have huge cost savings as well."

Says Anuj Bhalla, VP and Global Head, System Integration and Maintenance Services, Wipro ltd, "As a technology leader and enabler, a CIO will have to retain and attract top talent who highly-value and know their devices. Data security and protection of intellectual property is also a challenge. With the proliferation of mobile OS's like iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows, there is growing need to support multiple device types without increasing cost or complexity."

Getting Ready for BYOD

Cisco has had a BYOD policy for a couple of years now. VC Gopalratnam, CIO & VP, information technology, Cisco says, "BYOD has helped us enhance employee productivity by enabling employees to do company work when and where they want; provide a better user experience; and foster goodwill. This policy also goes beyond existing employees. The workforce is evolving, and as members of today's new technology-savvy generation enter the workforce, they want to choose how they can be most productive." While speaking about BYOD architecture, VC Gopalratnam points out, "To secure and protect data, we have developed a secure BYOD architecture which combines elements across the network for a unified approach to secure device access, visibility, and policy control. A BYOD implementation is not a single product, but must be integrated into the intelligent network. BYOD is an architectural solution."

But BYOD is beyond the use of own devices at workplace; it should also factor in how employees share information. Says Anand Naik, Managing Director - Sales, India & Saarc, Symantec, "Even when companies provide their own equipment, the trend towards consumerization means that companies often turn to consumer technology, such as file-sharing websites, and devices, such as consumer laptops or tablets, to reduce costs. These two trends open the door to a greater risk to businesses from mobile devices because they often lack security features such as encryption, access control, and manageability."

Highlighting concerns about security, Anand Naik, Managing Director - Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec adds, "Where employees use unauthorized cloud applications for their work, such as social networking sites for marketing purposes, they open up the company to attack from Web based malware."

Similarly, selecting the right technology partner to manage the entire ecosystem of mobile computing platforms, networks and applications can help keep enterprises secure and at the same time flexible to meet employees demands. Most of the leading IT services companies have developed competencies to help enterprises manage mobility and BYOD.