Businesses Now Driving "Bring Your Own Device" Trend

snydeq writes "Companies are no longer waiting for users to bring in their own smartphones and tablets into business environments, they're encouraging it, InfoWorld reports. 'Two of the most highly regulated industries — financial services and health care (including life sciences) — are most likely to support BYOD. So are professional services and consulting, which are "well" regulated. ... The reason is devilishly simple, Herrema says: These businesses are very much based on using information, both as the service itself and to facilitate the delivery of their products and services. Mobile devices make it easier to work with information during more hours and at more locations. That means employees are more productive, which helps the company's bottom line.' Even those companies who haven't yet embraced bring your own device policies yet already have one in place, but don't know it, according to recent surveys."

Buy your own devices

[betterunixthanunix]

FTFY.

Really, why buy equipment for your employees when you can just make them buy it on their own?

Maybe. If it is correct.

[khasim]

First off, those articles are very badly written. And they seem to be linked to InfoWorld's recent run of articles about how IT is PREVENTING such "adoption". Strange.

Secondly, he's quoting a guy from a firm that sells products to manage phones. He is NOT quoting ANYONE from ANY company in the health care industry.

In 2010 and for much of 2011, many in IT got scared when they saw iPhones, iPads, and Android in the office, fearful these heretical devices would cause corporate collapse as the BlackBerry sanctum was sacked and untold evils followed.

What?

OK, so most companies today have moved past that initial fear and made peace with the notion that modern mobile devices were now part of their technology fabric, though driven by user demand.

It is DECEMBER 2011. That's some fast action by "most companies" in a few months.

There's a HUGE difference between allowing such devices on the UNSECURED WIRELESS NETWORK and connecting them to the servers that hold private data.

He doesn't seem to be covering that difference.
And he doesn't have any quotes from companies that are doing what he claims.

Re:also reduces IT costs

[rickb928]

Ditto. We've had one virus infestation here in six years. All it cost me was two weeks reduced productivity as I rebuilt my notebook, finding 'latent' backups of source code and such to replace what was damaged and rendered unusable by the infestation, and a few customer complaints about delays. Overall, for me, I probably lost 20-30 hours of useful time.

Times >3500 other users similarly affected. For that shared drive only.

And they know how it got in. Not a BYOD, but a corporate device, misused. Unfortunate.

Had this been a BYOD, more people over in the security group would have been on the carpet then already were.

Re:Offloading IT cost onto employees

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that the fact that here in Canada, an employee of a company is not allowed to treat the cost fo a computer as a business expense (for tax purpoes), and the reduction in salary experienced by the employee is even greater than the benefit received by the employer.

Actually, Canadian tax law says that almost all expenses incurred by an employee and not reimbursed by their employer are not deductible, even if they are related to their job.

There are some exceptions, such as if the employer requires the employee to maintain an office at home and doesn't reimburse the employee. In this case, the employer can fill out form T2200 [cra-arc.gc.ca].

If your position requires you to maintain a professional designation required by law (such as a chartered accountant), those fees are deductible if not reimbursed by the employer.

There are a few others, but employees in Canada get very few tax breaks.

Re:Maybe. If it is correct.

[SlippyToad]

And he doesn't have any quotes from companies that are doing what he claims.

I work for a largish healthcare firm. $6b fortune 500 company. We are doing it. The magic is Citrix, which insulates you from your end user's environment. We aren't yet to bring your own laptop except for a few folks in IT, but I see it coming soon.

Re:also reduces IT costs

[lgw]

It just takes 1 piece of malware on your network or one security event to loose all the financial benefit.

But BYOD is better from a security perspective - those deveice are never on your network! The whole point is to move everything a user can pohysically touch into the DMZ, and limit the "trusted LAN" to the datacenter itself. It's a far, far better security model.

And if these BYODs actually hold any sensitive informaiton, you're doing it wrong. The end-user devices get only pixels! All the email and documents stay in the datacenter, the end-user devices only ever see a remote desktop.