These days it is not uncommon for you to access your official mails on your personal Blackberry or Android or iPhone. This is exactly what a BYOD or bring-your-own-device model is. It is quite a challenge for enterprise IT teams to ensure security of network and corporate data every time an employee accesses sales report or downloads sensitive information on his own device.
The adoption of BYOD is on rise and a recent poll by market researcher IDC shows that more than half the polled companies support employees using their own device. It is also shown that there exists a positive link between usage of employee own device and employee satisfaction. This is a great news as it can help reduce cost as well as boost employee performance.
From BYOD to BYOS
As more employees start to use BYOD model, the boundary is getting pushed beyond devices to include software and services that employees want to use directly. Today 77% of online adults in US use at least one personal cloud service such as Dropbox (a file sharing service). This consumerization of IT is leading to a shift towards more personal choice and ability to personally select the tools that employees want to use. Many products are moving away from perpetual to subscription based model and offering SAAS (software-as-a-service). So, employees are increasingly selecting what is available. Well, if you represent enterprise IT, there are many challenges that you have to deal with.
Security
This is probably the biggest issue to deal with in a BYOS model. Similar to BYOD, organizations need to worry about if these BYOS services meet their security requirements. Moreover concern around providing access to sensitive data has to be solved before the integration can work.
Integration
Though this is somewhat related to security but organizations need to consider any additional cost of hardware and software that these services might need and how requirements across multiple groups can be managed together.
Support
Just like any service model is built with standard SLA, BYOS is no different. It is important to understand them and know the quality of support should things go wrong.
Future proof
Are the services customization and extensible? It is important that BYOS remains compatible with other IT systems and integration points where they are used.
Just like the forces of BYOD models are prevailing, BYOS is here to stay. We better get in front of it!
True Hemant. Many of the organizations have started adopting this integration platform. Good example is analytics. Companies are paying to 3rd party vendors to purchase data for their own business and do analytics. So BYOS can be a good choice for companies where they will atleast increase the probability of getting the data at 1st place rather than looking outside and do analytics easily. I do not need to explain analytics here but hope one can perceive the benefits of using it.
Companies are no more investing in purchasing propitiatory tools/softwares which are restricted to company norms and policies and adhere to licensing.
I use bluejeans , skype , google hangout for my personal and official work both and doing collaboration across the world, no matter who owns it!!
Good phrase: Being Agile Is More Important Than Being Perfect 🙂
@Abhishek, thanks for sharing a very interesting use case and also some of the services that you use both in personal and official domain.
Do you think the boundary of BYOS can get pushed beyond just employee to include customers as well? It can be an interesting and significant development to BYO model.