BYOD: the Pros and Cons of Bringing Your Own Device

21st December, 2011 - Posted by Prem Iyer - No Comments

It’s the holiday season, and regardless of what holidays you celebrate, there’s a very good chance that gifts will be exchanged in your household or between friends. And one of this year’s most popular gifts is one of the consumer technology market’s hottest products: the tablet. Tablets from giants like Samsung, Apple, Motorola and Amazon are ushering in a new way of computing.

Considering a tablet’s ability to do similar jobs as a desktop or laptop computer with as much ease and far more mobility, it comes as absolutely no surprise that employees would want to begin utilizing their tablets in the workplace. This phenomenon is referred to as “bring your own device,” or “BYOD.”

The desire to get the same advanced, mobile capabilities in the office as they have at home is driving employees to demand that their companies embrace BYOD. And many will simply bring their devices in anyway, regardless of their company’s policies. It’s safe to say that BYOD is an inevitability.

And this is good news for small and medium-sized businesses, because there are multiple benefits of BYOD.

First is the cost. Employees that bring in their own state-of-the-art mobile devices and tablets are making that technology available to the company at no cost. When you consider what these devices sell for, that can be a huge savings when multiplied across an entire company.

The advanced capabilities are an additional benefit. From mobile video communication, to a wide range of productivity applications available via easy and inexpensive download from app stores, tablets can herald in a new, more mobile era of increased productivity and effectiveness at your company.

Unfortunately, many IT people feel that having tablets popping up on your company’s network isn’t as innocuous as it may seem.

By incorporating tablets, smartphones and other endpoints onto your company’s networks, the network is becoming more vulnerable. Each additional untethered endpoint is an additional security risk that your IT department may be unprepared to handle.

Other IT professionals will point out the bandwidth issues that BYOD creates. Bandwidth can be an expensive and limited resource for small and medium-sized companies. The addition of personal mobile devices connected to networks via wi-fi can compound a company’s existing bandwidth issues.

To help make embracing BYOD easier, some companies are taking innovative approaches and implementing creative and unique policies and technologies to help make BYOD a more risk-free concept. We’ll take a closer look at some of these approaches in subsequent posts on the High Tech Highway.

Until then, you may want to sit down and think about if your company is ready for the post-holiday crush of mobile devices and the challenges that it could bring. Ultimately, BYOD is going to happen. Your company will need to prepare its network and IT staff to overcome these challenges. Luckily, the benefits should certainly outweigh them.