BYOD is hot! But is it for you? If yes, which flavor would be applicable? The right type of BYOD solution should be aligned with a business strategy and driven by the right technology and IT considerations.
Bring your own device, or BYOD, has grown to become a term that encompasses many of the permutations of an “any device” strategy: allowing guests with their own devices for basic Internet access, enabling partners to connect to the corporate infrastructure, corporate-paid devices that are supported by employees, and the Holy Grail of BYOD, employee-paid and employee-supported devices connected to the corporate network with the ability to access corporate information.
Before choosing a BYOD flavor, the first step is identifying the business driver for a BYOD strategy. This might not be as obvious as it seems. It is not unusual for IT groups to lose direction in the noise from their user community and sometimes from the “peer pressure” that comes with a hot business and technology trend. A clear entitlement strategy around “who gets what” and “how they get access” is important, and so is minimizing the exceptions. If not kept in check, these exceptions can quickly grow into a “grey IT” nightmare.
The entitlement strategy should include a plan for clearly communicating the rules of the game to all end users.
An important IT policy that has to be determined and aligned with the business strategy is support. As IT organizations open up their environment to let disparate devices access the infrastructure, the support burden on IT can increase significantly. Letting employees self-support their devices and applications is an increasingly popular option. In this case, IT does not usually provide any support to users but will offer usage best practices through training, enterprise social media tools and internal communication.
This type of self-support model will not work in every environment, however, and many IT organizations are striving for a balance. They might, for example, provide support for basic email and calendar applications but leave everything else including device support to the end users. Tight integration of the business and technology considerations, along with a strategy for enterprise billing, reporting, and other IT services related to BYOD, are important.
After the right business case, policies and support strategies are identified, the technology challenges associated with BYOD should be addressed. These challenges can be rolled under three broad areas: policy enforcement, unified access and data protection.
Centralized policy enforcement, which aligns with the business strategy that has been identified, should be considered non-negotiable. Disparate processes for enforcing policies will undermine the stability of the enterprise policy framework as a whole. Policy enforcement should be designed to scale globally, applied across all access paths to the infrastructure, and managed with simple control systems. The centralized policy enforcement should have the capability to be applied to all users including employees, contingent workers, partners and guests.
A unified access architecture ensures that a standard, seamless access to the infrastructure is provided to the end users, including wired, wireless (Wi-Fi) and remote access (hardware- and software-based VPNs). A unified access strategy also helps IT reduce operational overhead, simplify security standards, and lower total cost of ownership. This also includes providing superior wireless service, resulting in better end user experience.
Data protection standards involve data privacy, security and integrity of the data in mobile devices, separation of personal and corporate data, and management of corporate data in employee-owned devices. Data protection with BYOD is an evolving area, and both the technology industry and legal experts are working toward coming up with the right balance. Although a compartmentalization application or a virtual desktop solution can provide clear demarcation of data, the challenge is to balance this design with user experience, especially on mobile platforms that have relatively lower processing and compute power.
Another important consideration is advanced security. With security threats growing in significance, it is critical for organizations to adapt a context-aware security enforcement strategy that can connect the infrastructure, applications and the related policies.
Finally, despite its popularity and industry buzz, BYOD may not be for everyone. The openness of BYOD may not be applicable due to compliance, regulatory, security or other business requirements.
Organizations can still benefit from innovations such as unified access and centralized policy enforcement to improve user experience, increase security and reduce costs.
Jawahar Sivasankaran is a distinguished engineer and senior technical director with Cisco Systems.
