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Businesses Now Driving "Bring Your Own Device" Trend
snydeq writes "Companies are no longer waiting for users to bring in their own smartphones and tablets into business environments, they're encouraging it, InfoWorld reports. 'Two of the most highly regulated industries — financial services and health care (including life sciences) — are most likely to support BYOD. So are professional services and consulting, which are "well" regulated. ... The reason is devilishly simple, Herrema says: These businesses are very much based on using information, both as the service itself and to facilitate the delivery of their products and services. Mobile devices make it easier to work with information during more hours and at more locations. That means employees are more productive, which helps the company's bottom line.' Even those companies who haven't yet embraced bring your own device policies yet already have one in place, but don't know it, according to recent surveys."
with users bringing their own devices and loading sensitive data on them , customer data is lost in so many directions, its hard to point out the who actually "lost" the data in the first place.
This will not end well.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Doesn't add any problems if you were already accessing software as a service over the internet, or if you were already providing software as a service to outsource partners etc.
Merely allowing employees access to the courtesy wifi internet access doesn't create new problems. Merely allowing employees to log into "internet" apps just like the contractors already do doesn't create any new problems.
Basically, its just a concept of getting rid of the "trusted" LAN and everyone and everything lives in the DMZ, both servers and clients. Once you reach the tipping point of moving your "IT" stuff into the internet DMZ, the process accelerates until its all there, and you are basically a colocated software as a service shop and a really small time ISP.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Slashdot just posted this other Galen Gruman story based on how to get your user devices into your business behind IT's backs: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/2154224/how-to-thwart-the-high-priests-in-it
Now another story about user devices getting into business behind IT's backs, also by Galen Gruman.
Enough already!
I8-D
I scanned TFA, and it looks like I will disagree with 70-90% of the assertions therein. I can't call them 'facts', because they aren't.
No mention of the security issues surrounding BYOD. For industries that reject bringing your own notebook to work, the assertion that financial services firms are embracing BYOD borders on the ludicrous, with a healthy dose of fantasy. Here at least, in a Fortune 50 financial services company, BYOD isn't even up for discussion. The security issues for Personally Identifiable Information alone rule out permitting any significant use of data on a device that is unsecured. And YOD is presumed to be unsecured, since it cannot be confirmed or assured by the people in data security that are responsible for preventing data loss. That's not 'minimizing' the loss, but preventing it. Nice try, Infoworld, but you're not fooling me into thinking I can load up my Android or iOS phone with corporate data. Not here anyways.
They then launch into how 'app-savvy' hardware is so great. Help me here - is 'app-savvy' another way of saying 'high-performance'? I thought so. Feh.
Good Devices may supply mobile device management systems to their customers, but I can name you a 50,000 seat company that may or may not use it, but if they do it's for captive devices - Blackberrys - that are never going to be BYOD. Quoting such a study is regurgitating their self-serving (and I expect nothing less, they are out for a propfit after all) hype and fantasy that with their services, BYOD is perfectly secure. Again, where I work, promises are not enough. Security is based on assurance. Little of it is provided by third parties. I can't even share data with co-workers in many/most cases. The concept of letting employees run mission-critical (data is mission-critical to a financial services company) or senstitive data apps would not be laughable here. It would be dismissed out of hand.
More to the point, however, the idea that somehow the device changes the nature of your work is both spot on and wide of the mark. If you're primarily displaying data, a table is par excellence. as soon as you need to enter data, it's a losing proposition. Depending on your role, tablets and smartphones offer some advantages.
My brother has been delivering real-time production data to his workforce worldwide (wherever there is a signal, WiFi, CDMA, GSM, or satellite) since Palm first made a phone. He's added native support for every OS as of last year. He sees the craze, and his boss asks him sometimes about how this 'Android thing' would work for them. And he responds that it has been working 'for a while now'.
And no, they do not do BYOD. They supply whatever is required for whatever geographic region the rep is in. But they could suport BYOD, since he supports some customers directly with the same apps, where they are BYOD only because it isn't 'his' device. And he sees the security issues. SSL is so flawed he considers it useless, but there is nothing else right now except for VPN tunnels. That's where he's at, and some Java sandboxing that he thinks is ensuring data is gone when the session is gone. But he knows that rooting devices will some day thwart that.
And since I can root most Android devices without a lot of effort, that alone makes BYOD for work just impossible.
Lastly, I read up on the link from IW that Android is making inroads into business environments that the IT staff are unaware of. Well, actually, I can't use any of my personal mail at work any more unless it's on my Android phone. I don't consider that a BYOD instance, since if I connected to the corporate WiFi, I wouldn't be able to use personal email on it then either. I can. theoretically, dump data to the phone via USB or a uSD card, but that would be logged and scanned, and PII would be captured and alarms sounded. Yes, my work notebook can be prevented from downloading data to a removable device, any sort of device. It can also check if the device is encrypted, which they all must be.
Hype. Misstatement. Fantasy. But it may sell more stuff, and that would be the point of TFA.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
First off, those articles are very badly written. And they seem to be linked to InfoWorld's recent run of articles about how IT is PREVENTING such "adoption". Strange.
Secondly, he's quoting a guy from a firm that sells products to manage phones. He is NOT quoting ANYONE from ANY company in the health care industry.
What?
It is DECEMBER 2011. That's some fast action by "most companies" in a few months.
There's a HUGE difference between allowing such devices on the UNSECURED WIRELESS NETWORK and connecting them to the servers that hold private data.
He doesn't seem to be covering that difference.
And he doesn't have any quotes from companies that are doing what he claims.