By Evy Schwartz
Bring your own device (BYOD) to work? Not only are companies looking the other way but some organizations are actually giving the go ahead. Interestingly enough, federal agencies seem to be leading the way.
Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker, predicted that it will be within 2 years that federal agencies embrace a BYOD strategy. According to Baker, this means employees will be able to use their own devices to connect to the internal network, FierceGovernmentIT. So if the feds are doing it…surely companies worldwide will begin to allow the seepage of personal devices in the workplace.
But what could be motivating this sudden acceptance of personal devices? Thanks to a recent survey by Citrix, we’ve got some insight into this. For instance: more than 90% of companies polled said some employees are already using noncompany-issued computing devices for work-related tasks (I can almost see steam coming from our IS Director’s head now!). So other than ”if we can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” here are the top 10 motivators that are moving the private sector to adopt this new strategy:
- Ease of working off-site.
- Employees have relevant equipment.
- Attract and retain top talent.
- Decrease device management costs.
- Attract and retain younger workers.
- Attract and retain other worker types (such as home-based).
- Reduce training and on-boarding costs.
- Enable self-service IT.
- Bolster business continuity.
- Best way to handle proliferation of devices.
But whoa…wait a minute! What about security? What about all of the sensitive docs that will be floating in and out of secure environments?
Yes, it’s all fine and dandy until someone gets an eye poked out (I mean until this causes a major security breach). IT folks have had a hard time securing data even with systems that are securable. The evidence is in the multitude of breaches that have happened in the past year alone. Adding personal devices to the mix is a whole other level of security risk.
But don’t worry; we’re working on having a solution for this very problem. You may have heard that we’ve added TappIn to our family of products.
Simply stated, TappIn allows sensitive data to be shared on any device (iPad, iPhone, Android, laptop, desktop, etc) in a secure manner without having to upload and store data in the cloud! So even though convenience may be pushing you to accept outside devices being used sooner that you’d like, you’ll have an easy option to manage this in a way that keeps sensitive data secure.
