BYOD: Bring Your Own Disaster

In keeping with the tradition of the last three to five years, 2012 is being touted by analysts and vendors alike as "the year for VDI." This year there is a slightly new twist to the hype and marketing, and that's Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). It's a simple concept: Employees own devices that they like to use and are most productive on; IT should support the apps and services used to run the business on the employees' devices.

It’s not a wholly new concept; many companies have used this model in some fashion for years. For example, Cisco has allowed employees to purchase and use their own Apple notebooks for their daily tasks for some time. The caveat in this case was that it was a self-support model. Employees had to service their own devices and ensure they could perform daily tasks without IT assistance. A culture anchored on an extensive wiki of users supporting each other grew at Cisco and the model thrived. It gave employees choice, without overburdening IT with support, application rewrites, and so on.

The new concept of BYOD extends far beyond that to phones, tablets, laptops and operating systems of all types. Many people claim the proliferation of tablets as the catalyst for this change. I’d personally identify the iPhone as the catalyst. And I'd go further by saying that it's not the proliferation of the iPhone itself that has been the catalyst, but the people to whom the device has been spreading: corporate executives.

As traditional enterprise phones fell behind other devices, people were tired of carrying comparative paperweights and weren’t interested in carrying two phones. Additionally, the iPhone put smartphone capability in a sleek, easy-to-use package that was interesting to traditionally non-techie corporate CXOs and other executives. These execs pushed for corporate support of the devices because they were using them and they were hearing that their peers in other companies were adopting them. From there, the devices propagated through the company.

The next wave has been composed of tablets, Android phones and other devices, and this is where the concept of BYOD comes in. The word "no" used to be commonplace in the vocabulary of enterprise IT and the CIO/CTO. In the past, they would have easily handled this problem of BYOD, but now the end user with the request is an equal or senior in the company.

Unfortunately, BYOD is wrought with complication and risk. Most enterprises have enough issues trying to secure and maintain current IT environments with standardized images and hardware. Adding a BYOD model exponentially increases this complexity, and, with that, costs.

Another issue with much of the BYOD hype is that it’s tied to VDI--that is, provide a virtual desktop image to the end users' devices and lock that image down. The issue here is that most tablet or smartphone users like the device for the native experience it provides and do not want to use it as a standard desktop. Anyone who’s used VDI on a tablet understands that it offers value for some tasks but it’s not ideal.

To avoid disaster with a BYOD plan, you need to decide what, if any, business value it brings. One great example is recruiting and maintaining talent. Health care is a great use case for this. At many hospitals and doctor offices, health care providers have laptops on carts or netbooks that they bring to patient rooms. These are cumbersome and inefficient for the required task of patient data entry. Tablets, on the other hand, work quite well for this, and add additional benefits such as easier cleanup/sterilization.

Providing functionality for tablets may assist in keeping top talent. Your first task should be identifying the groups that can benefit from BYOD and narrowing the scope as much as possible. This can and should include user groups, supported devices, and possibly whether they are issued devices or actual BYOD.

Next you’ll need to consider the user experience provided. In most cases, a virtual desktop won’t be appropriate for tablets and phones. This is where the concepts of private and public cloud come in. The services your employees use can be provided through native applications that rely on cloud-based software hosted internally or externally. This model provides the native user experience with the required productivity. (For more information on delivering services, see http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/231000980.)

Another emerging concept that should be assessed is virtualization for phones and tablets. These products offer the potential for employees to use a phone of their choice and maintain separate images for work and personal use, complete with contact, calendar, and so on. This provides the ability to lock down a corporate image while the employee maintains complete freedom with his or her own image. For example, if an employee is terminated, the corporate image can be remote-wiped, removing key contacts and other data as well as the company issued phone number.

Don’t get caught up in the BYOD hype and start down a road that leads to cost and complexity. Assess your organization's needs and the groups that would benefit from BYOD. Decide which devices make sense and who will pay for those devices. Find the most efficient delivery model for the services that will run on those devices, and default to a native user experience where possible. BYOD has both the potential for acceleration of parts of your business and disaster for IT support and costs.

Disclaimer: In my primary role I work with several products and vendors mentioned here. This article is not an endorsement of those products or vendors.