The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) Movement
The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) movement is well underway. Especially in times of recession and its aftermath, the win-win proposition offered by BYOD is pretty irresistible. Businesses, governments, and schools all face budget pressures, very serious pressures at that. In that climate, imagine employees in mass numbers ‘contributing’ a several hundred dollar or more device to their workplace. This is quite a panacea for organizations struggling with costs, whatever the reason.
Simultaneously, employees actually prefer to use their own devices — smartphones, tablets, and laptops — that they are intimately familiar with and that they have carefully chosen to purchase.
Furthermore, the value of these devices to an enterprise increases annually, as VoIP and other services emerge to address work needs. The utility o f mobile devices also expands rapidly when a company is successful at cross-platform com munications and the creation of cloud-based infrastructures.
Secure Systems
All of these positives threaten to create fervor that may bring about carelessness, however. Hackers and malware also have new opportunities. Consequently, BYOD implementation is great, but only to the degree that it is accompanied by successful BYOD security. Tomorrow is too late when unauthorized access to company data or private customer information has been compromised today.
Survey Shows Companies Embrace BYOD
A recent study suggests, not surprisingly, that larger companies are among the first to embrace BYOD. In fact, 80 percent of companies with over 2,000 employees support BYOD. It is reasonable to infer that larger companies have the resources and the efficiencies of scale to support proper security. Furthermore, they more often have the capacity to deal with cross-platform problems that may arise.
These issues do not appear that problematic for most companies, however. The same study revealed that only about nine percent of organizations have no plans in place to embrace the BYOD movement.
Fully 72 percent of all companies responding to the survey state that they already support BYOD. Another 19 percent expect to do so in the future.
Employees Pay, Half The Time
In general, enterprises that presently embrace BYOD however, expect employees to pay for their own devices about half of the time. Most employees are more than happy to do so, however. They have the opportunity to work on mobile devices they are very familiar with, and their employers benefit from the increased productivity that this dynamic generates.
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