Bring Your Own Device - OK, Now What?

The IT world is full of acronyms and abbreviations. One of the most talked about acronyms doing the rounds at the moment is BYOD - Bring Your Own Device. But what does it mean for the end-user, the IT department and the business?

For the end-user, this is an easy one. Let's say Sue bought an iPad for her own purposes - emails, watching YouTube videos, games for the kids - and would like to use it to log on to her company's cloud-based applications. This may be while in the office, while at home watching TV or while on the train in the morning rush. She has a device capable of connecting to the cloud, she's comfortable using it and her company has compatible cloud services. Seems like a no-brainer - let Sue use her iPad to log onto the company's applications and everybody wins. Only the business function probably has some other views on that ....

The CFO is delighted by the concept of BYOD. Many of the company's staff are bringing in their tablets and smartphones and the bottom line is that he now doesn't have to provide these devices in order to keep the workforce mobile and productive – at anywhere up to $1000 per device, that’s a handy saving. If staff are using their own mobile devices, maybe he can get them bringing their own laptops and PCs too! This is win-win right? Until at a conference, one of the directors is deep in conversation with one of his peers. The story being told is a sorry tale of a disgruntled employee who got fired, then proceeded to log in via his iPad and steal the company secrets before deleting lots of important files. Now this director's delight is turning rapidly to fear, so the first thing he does is pay a visit to the IT department and asks how this can be stopped.

The IT department is probably hiding in some dark, damp area of the basement drinking coffee and trying to grow a beard. While the director lays down the law that we can't have people just connecting up their own devices willy-nilly, IT has a better solution - Mobile Device Management, or MDM. IT explains that this allows the company to set policies on who or what can connect to their systems - even if a user has a valid account and can access financial information from their PC, policies can allow or disallow users from connecting from devices that are not known to the company. IT also explains that when a member of staff leaves the company, they tick a box and that person can no longer access data from their device. Further to that, IT has the power to delete all company data from that device remotely with the click of a mouse. By using an MDM solution, the company still controls the flow of and access to its lifeblood - its data. Even if they don't own the devices that would normally access it.

So now the CFO can rest easy that he doesn't have to go out and purchase devices for his staff. MDM means it is now easy - and easy on the purse strings - to let staff bring in their own devices, while still maintaining absolute control over company data.

Modern Computing

So what's the big deal about cloud computing and security issues (perceived or otherwise) around BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)?

Firstly let's get one thing out of the way: Cloud computing is really just computing these days. All of us use some form of cloud, whether for productivity tools such as Google Apps or Office 365, for backups and storage such as Dropbox and SkyDrive, for entertainment such as YouTube and Netflix, or maybe you have a full private cloud solution for your business applications and data management. All of us use 'the cloud'. If there is anybody out there not using the cloud at all, I'd be interested to hear about it in the comments.

So I'm just going to call it Modern Computing. The thing with Modern Computing, is that we want to access our applications, personal data and public information at any time, from any place using any device. In the past if you wanted to access a file from the office, you had to be in the office using a PC or laptop owned and managed by the company. While the IT department loved this because they could manage access end to end, it really doesn't fit with Modern Computing.

So all of your data and all of your applications are somewhere else. There are real and perceived security concerns around this, of course.You need to be sure your data has adequate protection from hacking, leakage and loss, for example. But this isn't really as big an issue as it seems. You choose your cloud provider based on your specific requirements - of which security is a priority - and then you trust them to do their job. After all, they will make every effort to keep your data safe, or suffer a very public embarrassment which would lose them business. It is in their very best interests to keep your data safe.

Which brings us to BYOD - Bring Your Own Device. While not an entirely new phenomenon, the act of end users using their own devices at work - smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc - is gathering pace these days. The reason? Simple. Users are purchasing the likes of the iPad for personal use and just finding it easier to manage their day to day activities on it than on a clunky old desktop PC that ties then to the office between 9 and 5 every day. Initially IT hated this idea because they no longer had control of those end user devices and became scared of security issues - mostly data loss because of deliberate or accidental removal of data. But more and more now, IT is embracing BYOD because data is kept in the cloud and accessed directly from it (meaning less chance of leakage) and because now they can spend their budgets on other things than PCs and laptops, and spend their time more productively than purchasing, configuring and delivering PCs and laptops to each desk.

According to a recent Gartner report, half of employers will require employees to supply their own device by 2017.

Modern Computing means everything we do and by definition includes the devices we use to do it. That means that while BYOD is a big buzz-word at the moment, the term will most likely disappear over the coming months and years. So while people are enjoying being able to use their own devices for work purposes at the moment, get used to that becoming the norm.

How ridiculous is DRM?

I've written about DRM before. I hate it. It is the spawn of the devil. It is the tool that tells you "Hey, you know that product you just spent good money to buy? Well yeah, you will never really own it".

The guys over at Ecal decided to demonstrate DRM by making a chair that can only be sat on 8 times before the joints melt and the thing falls apart. You can view the video on Gizmodo.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. But it does show how DRM can destroy something you believe is yours.

So my advice is to avoid anything with DRM built-in, until the perpetrators of it get the message. Hop over to Defective by Design and read up on the alternatives.