It’s funny how things evolve so quickly. Just a few years ago, the thought of employees using their own phones or laptops for work at work was unthinkable.
But as the consumerization of IT trend grows from a trickle to a flood, many organizations have no choice but consider how to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. And the experience at Softchoice was no different.
Let’s start with the obvious.
There is no silver bullet, one-size-fits-all checklist for creating the perfect Bring Your Own Device strategy. Every organization is completely different.
But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Many of the technologies necessary to support a strategy are probably already in your ecosystem. It’s just a matter of knowing what’s missing, and how to leverage what you’ve already got.
To give you a hand, we’ve assembled seven tools and technologies that make planning and executing your BYOD strategy a reality.
Depending on your organization, BYOD means a lot of different things. BYOD can be a welcome change (employee retention, talent acquisition, employee satisfaction, productivity enhancement, lower IT costs, and potentially customer satisfaction) or a challenge (security, access/restriction of data, lost devices, etc).
Regardless, the first step is knowing the who’s, what’s and where’s of your network. The Softchoice Mobility TechCheck gives you visibility into how many devices and what kind of devices are already on your network.
With this data, companies can start to develop a plan around BYOD, such as:
I’m holding a special mobile security webinar in December to answer your questions – read on for full details on this and our assessment.
Recently Stephen Speirs from Cisco wrote a blog post about The Winchester House, as an analogy to explain how IT often evolves in unplanned ways.
I’d like to extend Stephen’s analogy a little further by using the Winchester House as an example of what can happen when organizations over time continually enhance and upgrade their infrastructure without proper planning and foresight.
But first, what is the Winchester House? The Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose, California, was the residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun maker William Winchester. Sarah was obsessed with building out the house and so arranged for construction around the clock, from 1884 until her death in 1922. Construction costs were estimated at about US $5.5 million in 1922; equivalent to over $75 million today.
The house’s real claim to fame however, isn’t the construction; it’s the complete lack of any master building plan. The house has 160 rooms, 24,000 square feet, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 6 kitchens, 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and 47 fireplaces. Sixty-five of the house’s doors lead to blank walls, 13 staircases lead nowhere, 24 skylights are covered by floors.
So how does this relate to IT?
While BYOD (bring-your-own-device) seems to be a major concern of IT administrators today, BYOA – or bring-your-own-application – is becoming increasingly as significant. Using third-party applications and cloud services in the workplace brings about a host of control, security and productivity considerations. And just like BYOD, BYOA is real. According to a recent Fortinet study of over 3,800 active employees in their twenties, 69 percent indicated that they were interested in creating and using their own applications, while 30 percent admitted they would likely contravene any restrictive company policies.
In this next BYOD Behind the Scenes expedition, I took a look at industry trends and conducted a poll of Softchoice employees to compile our top 3 applications to bring to work! Share this list to with your users and ensure they’re getting the most out of their chosen devices and can make the safest, most productive decisions for your company.
In my previous Behind the Scenes post, I explored how we developed and rolled out our own Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.
With such heavy activity in the media coupled by relentless pressure from users, by now you’re probably seriously thinking about following our lead and taking the plunge into mobile consumerization-station.
Hold it right there! We’ve been where you have, and we confidently say there are three often overlooked considerations to be aware of before embarking on your own mobile BYOD journey.
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