Though appearing to be a painless initiative, “bring your own device,” or BYOD, isn’t without its flaws — but what about choosing your own device?
Two industry leaders speaking at a RIM Blackberry event in Australia said that implementing choice into BYOD — thus making it CYOD — may be the right decision for companies in developing their own corporate architecture.
CFOWorld.com reported that Allan Davies, CIO of Dematic Asia-Pacific, and Tim Dillon, IDC associate vice president for Asia-Pacific, spoke about the benefits of a CYOD option and explained that businesses could have the ability to limit the hardware they support, allowing employees to choose from a selection of devices that could be replaced easily by the company.
“If an employee said, ‘I want to bring in this Android device,’ we could say, ‘OK, we have those in our choice. You can use your own but if yours breaks we will temporarily give you ours,'” Davies said.
This comes on the heels of an internal study done by Intel which surveyed over 2,500 employees about whether they’d prefer to choose from a number of devices picked out by the company, or bring in their own device.
The study showed that 72% of employees would be interested in CYOD while 4% would prefer to bring in their device.
Benefits of CYOD
By giving employees a choice from selected devices, the company has better control over two key issues: security and support.
Familiarizing IT with a specific operating system or line of hardware would ensure that requests for IT support would remain consistent — there’d be little to no surprise waiting for IT.
Also, the company can have more uniformity in its data security efforts, applying the same security system to every device. While it can’t 100% prevent against a security breach, if every device has the same set of security controls, a breach would be much easier to handle.
Davies and Dillon both stressed that a CYOD can contribute to a “flexible corporate architecture” where employees won’t need to depend on an external device to accomplish tasks.
Do you think CYOD would ultimately serve a business better than BYOD? What type of device program is your business seeing success with? Let us know in the comments.
