I’ve always been very sceptical of BYOD. Whilst I understand why the employee wants to use their own device, there are more concerns for the employer. I feel it’s an area that whilst everyone talks about it, not everyone understands the implications. In many cases, I feel that BYOD is forced onto companies by employees not wanting to use sometimes clunky (relatively speaking), “not cool” and in some cases second-hand devices that are provided by the employers. Whilst companies do strive to keep their employees happy by accepting the use of personal devices in the workplace, this comes at a price in areas such as security, management, etc. It’s extremely difficult to control or forbid the use of employee devices in corporate networks. The larger the company, the more difficult it becomes. Employees will come up with various excuses about using their own device on a corporate network such as, “It’s my device, I’ll look after it better” or “I’m more productive” even “I never liked that that man anyway, I’d never use his OS” but this forces a situation that could be untenable onto the employer. In this age of consumerism and rapid advances in technology, people always want the latest and greatest devices to play with and to also use in their work environment. Companies are, quite rightly, more hesitant in changing devices over shorter timeframes due to cost and would prefer to implement policies whereby devices are depreciated over time (3 years seems to be the industry average) However, in opening up BYOD to employees, policies do need to be put into place. Areas that need to be addressed include:

1. Tax and cost implications
2. Management of devices
3. Protection of company data and assets
4. Device support
5. Application management and support
6. Device security policies

This is just for starters. As I develop this tech tidbit blog, I’ll add to this and will start to go over the points above in more detail. In the meantime, the following articles from techrepublic and zdnet make interesting reading.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/is-byod-here-to-stay-maybe-its-just-a-phase-youre-going-through/#ftag=RSS56d97e7

http://www.zdnet.com/revealed-the-true-costs-of-the-byod-7000016490/

http://www.zdnet.com/consumerization-byod-and-mdm-what-you-need-to-know_p4-7000010205/

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