From rumors of cost savings, to greater employee satisfaction, to more productivity – the reasons for initiating a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy span far and wide.
In the second addition to Softchoice’s BYOD Behind the Scenes Blog Series (read the first here), I wanted to explore exactly what triggered our decision to adopt a bring-your-own-device policy. Just as each organization is unique, each company designs its own BYOD policy based on its own individual reasons.
This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.
Most people feel naked without their smart phones and tablets. The adoption rates of these devices over the last five years have been explosive with an expected 10 billion by 2020, according to Morgan Stanley (to give you an idea of the magnitude – PCs and notebooks are at about 1 billion today.) Morgan Stanley also predicts that 95% of devices purchased for business will be by employees. This means that there will soon be a diverse selection of mobile devices in the office (for example right now Softchoice’s Employee Choice model has brought hundreds of iPhones into our environment.) How is IT going to cope with this?
Device heterogeneity is a serious issue. Similar versions of Apple’s IOS Operating System run on iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices. Android has been modified by several vendors including Samsung, HTC, and Motorola. HP recently introduced new versions of WebOS that run the Palm Pre3 and TouchPad. RIM has also introduced the Playbook that works with Blackberry devices. Is your head spinning yet?
All of this heterogenity has left network administrators confused about how to apply one of the most fundamental principles to these devices: centralized management. Lack of centralized control and updating is an architecture built for an individual, not an enterprise. Centralized management of mobile devices is crucial as part of a Data Loss Prevention program because of they are easily lost, stolen, (and likely soon to be) compromised.
Here are seven little known ways to implement a Mobile Device Management solution: [Read more...]
In December 2006, TJX – the company that owns retailers TJMaxx, Marshalls in US, and Winners and HomeSense in Canada – found suspicious software on its computer systems. Three months later, TJX admitted that a computer security breach had occurred and that more than 45 million of its shoppers’ credit cards had been compromised.
The crew of hackers responsible was eventually caught. Still, an eight-month investigation by the Canadian government – TJX owns stores in Canada and so [Read more...]
Not all tiers of storage are equal, especially when it comes to compliance. Optimize your storage architecture for regulatory obligations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and PCI, and you can recoup your compliance spend, make audits less painful and redeploy the savings to projects that have ROI potential. As with every aspect of your compliance efforts, it pays to have a plan.
When the auditors come knocking, of course, you need to have all your data in order. But, it doesn’t all have to be immediately available. Instead of investing heavily in a storage architecture that treats seven-year-old data like that generated only a few weeks ago, you should prioritize based on frequency of need. As long as you can reach the information you need, you’ll be able to satisfy the requirements dictated by the regulations with which your company has to comply.
Newer data should be stored for easy and rapid retrieval. In addition to its use for compliance tasks, there are other business needs which make the ability to access it quickly a priority (e.g., customer care activity, order processing). Older data, on the other hand, can be stored on less expensive equipment designed for archiving, as the frequency of use is low, and the likelihood that fast access is necessary is low.
So, how does this turn into an ROI opportunity?
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