Why Everyone Gets It Wrong About BYOD

snydeq writes "Brian Katz offers a simple take on the buzz around BYOD in business organizations these days: 'BYOD is only an issue because people refuse to realize that it's just about ownership — nothing more and nothing less.' A 'hidden issue' hiding in plain view, BYOD's ownership issue boils down to money and control. 'BYOD is pretty clear: It's bringing your own device. It isn't the company's device or your best friend's device. It's your device, and you own it. Because you own the device, you have certain rights to what is on the device and what you can do with the device. This is the crux of every issue that comes with BYOD programs.'"

Comments

Re:BYOD means I/T loses some control over it

[FireFury03]

Both devices have plenty of support for HTTP proxies.

Android Gingerbread lets you set a single HTTP proxy which applies to all networks. That means device owners have to manually enter and clear the proxy settings as they move between the office network and their home network. Not that it matters - almost all apps ignore the proxy settings anyway.

Android ICS and Jellybean let you set an HTTP proxy per wifi network, which at least means the user isn't expected to reconfigure the phone all the time. Most apps still ignore the proxy settings. Most of the apps that do pay attention to the proxy settings don't support authenticated proxy servers.

All recent versions of iOS allow the proxy and authentication credentials to be set on a per wifi network basis. That's excellent. Except that most apps (including a good chunk of the stock iOS apps that Apple ship with the phone) either ignore the proxy settings entirely or fail to support authenticated proxy servers. (Yes, Apple is aware of these problems - there are bug reports in their bug tracking system that have been open for several years, they aren't interested in fixing them).

Even then, Squid has a transparent proxy option.

Transparent proxying only works for HTTP, not HTTPS unless you are going to MITM all the sessions (which involves installing certificates on all the clients). And even then, you can't authenticate the users if you're proxying transparently.