Bring Your Own Everything Revisited

As advances in technology bring about a convergence of portable hardware, virtualized resources, and remotely hosted tools and platforms, there’s been a corresponding increase in the use of personal devices and related matters in the workplace and in public institutions. This trend has implications for the management, deployment, and security of IT resources – some of which we’ll consider now.

A Whole Lot of Acronyms

The move toward personalisation and customisation in the corporate world is classified under the blanket term Bring Your Own Everything – which for some reason has the acronym BYOx. Within its remit, there are several movements, as follows:

 

· BYOD or Bring Your Own Device: The use of personal smartphones, tablets, and other mobile equipment, for business purposes.

 

· BYOA or Bring Your Own Apps: Using personal software for office work.

 

· BYOE or Bring Your Own Encryption: Using personal tools for data encryption, rather than those provided by your employer.

 

· BYOI or Bring Your Own Identity: Which everyone does, by virtue of being there, but here extends to personal login profiles and accounts.

 

· BYOI or Bring Your Own Infrastructure: Augmenting existing IT resources with tools and computational power often sourced from the Cloud.

 

· BYOT or Bring Your Own Technology: Which could include devices, software and infrastructure.

 

· BYON or Bring Your Own Network: If corporate intranets and / or social networks aren’t enough.

 

· BYOW or Bring Your Own Wearables: Net-connected monitors and smart tools for performance enhancement.

 

Benefits in the Workplace

For employers, allowing workers to use their own devices and technology can (if it’s managed correctly) ease the burden of IT provision, and reduce the cost of providing hardware and software. Workers can be more productive and efficient, with increased access to necessary tools and data.

 

There are risks, of course – and operational difficulties. Some of these may be addressed officially, with the drawing up and implementing of comprehensive policies, such as those commonly used for BYOD. Among the issues which need to be addressed are:

 

· Measures to increase security and guard against data losses

· Separating employees’ personal information from business data

· Ensuring support for the full range of personal devices and technologies

· Managing the corporate network resources necessary for running these devices

· Maintaining compliance with industry standards and regulations

Impacts on IT

Inevitably, the BYOx movement has had an effect on the way IT is managed – and not always a good one.

 

A recent survey by SolarWinds questioned 298 public and private sector IT managers, directors, and practitioners across the USA and Canada, to assess the impact which BYOx, cloud, and mobile technologies were having on their operations. Over 90% of those surveyed agreed that their roles have been affected in the past 3 to 5 years by the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures. Small-scale enterprises were most affected by the rise of mobile technologies, while medium-sized businesses were greatly affected by BYOx.

 

Over 50% of those who responded expressed a desire for more training and access to pools of knowledge, to better assist them in adjusting to changes in their own role, and how that change fits into the overall business profile of the organisations employing them.

Infrastructure in Transportation

Innovation has been one response to the challenge posed by the BYOx phenomenon – notably in the transport sector.

 

Masabi, a developer of mobile applications for ticketing and commerce, set up a 2012 pilot scheme in the company’s native UK, which was later exported for transport companies in the United States. The scheme makes mobile apps available to commuters as a complementary booking and ticket issuing platform, augmenting the official system. Users of Android, iOS and Blackberry can buy tickets and monthly passes direct from their mobile devices, using a barcode or visual display on the device screen to validate tickets at turnstiles and points of entry.

 

A case of Bring Your Own Infrastructure, given a practical and cost-effective application. Commuters get the convenience of a streamlined ticketing process, while the transport authorities enjoy a smoother flow of passengers.

Now it’s Bring Your Own Cloud

Also known as BYOC – or “managed Shadow IT”.

The perceived sluggishness (by workers on the office floor) and lack of versatility of in-house IT provision often leads to employees devising clever ways to work around the official system, in order to gain access to the kind of software and resources they feel they actually need, or prefer working with. This “Shadow IT” culture has been the bane of organisations world-wide, for some time now.

 

With Bring Your Own Cloud, individual staff, teams, work-groups or entire departments may use third-party or public cloud services to boost their IT profile. Unregulated, this kind of activity can expose valued intellectual property and sensitive business data over the public Internet, and pose a serious financial and security risk to the enterprise.

 

Organisations can minimise this risk by investing in a hybrid or fully private cloud solution (with resources perhaps allocated to specific divisions that most require them), which would bring this activity within the corporate umbrella, and allow better monitoring and management of security and resource provision in-house.

 

Indeed, this kind of approach is what’s needed to ensure secure and efficient operations throughout the enterprise, as the BYOx movement continues to grow.