Monday 6 May 2013

BYOD - Bring Your own device

What is BYOD, seem's absurd at the first time. When i heard it for the first time, i thought, may be the author wanted to write BODY, looks similar, anyways, coming to the point, what is BOYD, it actually is a new policy, adopted by many organisation's, that allow's the employees to bring their own personal devices in work environment for official purposes.

( Benefits of bring personal devices to work )
Most of us working in a corporate environment know very well that, personal mobile devices (laptop, smart phones, notepads etc), storage media devices etc, are strictly prohibited in the work environment. But, in reality how many of us have always followed this rule, actually very few of us. Many people install various software's on their office machines, though it is not permitted, because they are comfortable using these software's, than those provided by the organisation. This comfort results in increased productivity. More output, more profit, with less  time and effort. This sounds good right, employees are satisfied, organisation is earning profit.

( Losses )
 However, good things never come for free. Now lets see other side of the coin. As employees, install  software's that are not recommended,  bring their own devices in the organisational network, it creates a big loop hole in the security framework of the organisation. Making it more and more vulnerable to different types of attacks from external sources. Gradually the organisations understood that stopping this is not possible, hence this new term came into picture.

( BYOD to enhance the benefits )
As said earlier, stopping the employees from bringing personal devices at work is not possible. Hence, these organisations decided to allow the employees to do so, but under certain guidelines. This is called as BYOD policy. This can relax the organisation as well as keep the employees happy.

As BYOD programs become more commonplace, 38% companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2017, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, a research firm.
Currently this concept is highly accepted by the american countries than that of european countries. However, apart from other benefits, if we think more widely, this will reduce the overall consumption of devices by the population, while serving its purpose. As there would be no need to buy 2 devices, 1 would be sufficient at the work place as well as at home. Hence, this approach if adopted by developing countries would be more beneficial.