TelePacific Blog: Telecommunications Insights

A new study from Gartner predicts that almost 50 percent of employers will stop supplying mobile devices and adopt a full-scale BYOD program by 2017. Only 15 percent of companies will never move to a BYOD model, and 40 percent will offer a choice between BYOD and employer-provided devices, according to the report.

In his coverage of the Gartner report, PCWorld’s Chris Kanaracus writes, “BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades.”

CMSWire offers five reasons why this is good news:

1. BYOD Leads to Real Business Innovation. Putting tools in the hands of resourceful, do-it-yourself employees drives real business innovation and real return on investment in the form of greater employee productivity. These employees know what their teams need, the specific requirements of the tools they need and how to get it done. Now, all they need is the green light. By supporting and encouraging employees to self-solve inefficiencies, the company’s customers will be better served.

2. BYOD + DIY = Fewer IT Development Backlogs. Enterprise end users want easy-to-use solutions that fit and flex to meet their evolving business needs. Empowering employees to bring their own devices and to use them to find their own solutions greatly alleviates IT development backlogs so you can focus your limited resources on more strategic needs.

3. Every App an Employee is Building is One that IT Isn’t. With BYOD comes DIY. Employees know what tools they need to more effectively do their jobs. Instead of customizing apps and programs to meet their needs, let them figure it out on their own. It’ll save you a headache and make them feel empowered. A win-win.

4. Employees Will Use the Tools and Programs They Want – With or Without the IT Department’s Permission. With cloud apps for improving productivity cropping up every day at employees’ fingertips, it’s important for you to understand and accept that employees will be using them. So what can be done? Approve the application for use so employees can leverage its full functionality. Support, encourage and enable this trend of employees taking action. You can help by providing application creation training to everyone and letting business users create apps as needed.

5. Security Can Be Solved. Your organization’s social media policy can serve as a rough template for creating a BYOD policy. There’s a level of trust required here, but with proper education beforehand, that can often be attained. The same formula goes for the DIY space, but should be taken one step further: Teach then trust… then observe and embrace. After employees are educated and trust is gained, monitor how the BYOD/DIY policy is being utilized — what are they bringing, what are they building? — and learn from it. By being aware of its usage, you can create a secure environment for the tool as well.

Much has been made of the security risks inherent in BYOD. Of course, employee education and awareness are important as informed users are more likely to act responsibly and take fewer risks with company data. Unfortunately, employees can be careless and criminals crafty, which is why a stout network security defense is so critical.

In the WAN area, TelePacific’s 1Net MPLS secure VPN backbone provides steadfast security that easily meets HIPAA or similar government regulations. Moreover, with a 1Net MPLS VPN solution, customers can have a single point of entry and use TelePacific’s suite of managed security services to keep their LAN protected from malicious intrusions and activity.