BYOD –What it means to the small company

Why rather than how

Too many of us in the IT sector, whether we come from the front line right through to the darkened halls of infrastructure, nothing draws more fear into the beating heart of techiedom than the thought of other people’s equipment on our networks.
Although the thought of bringing a BYOD policy into force may for many of you already be in place or certainly being considered in your environment, but this shouldn’t bring the amount of terror that any other device on the network would bring.

 The secret to successful BYOD policy creation is to decide how far you want to go, this can  tickle the edge of allowing email access onto smart phones, right through to “Sue from  accounts wanting to use her IPad”. Each of these brings their own issues certainly and we  need not discuss each in their own merit, but more to conceptualize why we should consider  them in the first place.

 Of course there are pros and cons to both with many end users being tired of basic office  standard computer fare; businesses tightening IT budgets and the users just wanted to work in  a more modern less ridged way.  This does sound like a great way of working with pros all  round,  yet the naysayer’s will talk about network security ,  access control, viral outbreaks…  the list could go on,  but with many of today’s services now being cloud based the opportunities  for working are pushing us even closer to an “office-less… office”

 Before you investigate things such as application wrapping many fine and some not so fine  software vendors are able to service everything you could ever need from all in packages  such  as Office 365 or Googledocs right through to bespoke CRM systems like Salesforce.

 Have well defined goals as to what you wish to achieve, whether it’s reduced hardware  overhead, flexible working or just plain peer pressure; questions such as what additional  added value does it bring to the existing IT services and how can it integrate into the existing  infrastructure should be taken into your plan; at the very least the three most basic  requirements are

       ·         Do we need it at all?

       ·         Can we use existing cloud based services?

       ·         How do we reduce risk a.k.a what do we do once the person leaves or the device lost?

 The risk is really not whether you should allow your users to “Bring your own device…” but with  a good thought out plan could be more a case of“what’s taken so long.”

Martin Bailey