BYOD Denial Seen as Hazardous to IT Health

IT managers who choose to look the other way as consumer devices unofficially seep into a company may be setting themselves up for a fall.

Dismissing “bring your own device” (BYOD) and consumerization trends as a passing fad or temporary annoyance may be a huge mistake – one that may very well impact a company’s competitive stance, say the experts. Instead, companies should be looking at consumerization as an inevitable requirement that should immediately be included as part of the existing data management strategy.

Policies should also be created to support a variety of devices that come in the door and reimburse employees for taking the initiative, notes Gartner, Inc. in a report released earlier this year. Despite current criticisms, the BYOD movement is likely the first wave in a coming IT evolution. While it may require some restructuring of mobile and security policies, it also presents IT with the opportunity to reinvent itself and learn from users who are in the trenches of applications use and customer interaction.

The movement is also spearheaded by young workers in their 20s and early 30s who grew up surrounded by technology and are eager and in a position to introduce new products into the IT mix, notes an article SearchConsumerization. BYOD Bottom Line A lot of organizations already provide support for personal devices, notes Gartner in the survey, which included input from companies with 500 or more employees based in a wide cross-section of countries, including the U.S. What it revealed is that 32 percent of the companies support smartphones, 37 percent tablets and 44 percent laptops.

Each company struggles with different legal and technical issues, depending on the region, although all are concerned with such basic requirements as mobile data protection (MDP), network access control (NAC), and mobile device management (MDM). The bottom line is that every IT manager should be thinking about adapting and accommodating new technology and not just maintaining the status quo.

“If your job today in the IT department consists of putting out fires, rebuilding stuff that broke and solving user’s problems, then you’re not doing IT work,” says Claudio Rodrigues, a consultant and CEO at WTSLabs Inc.

Read more on BYOD and the evolution of IT

Source: SearchConsumerization