BYOD beyond the noise

Just for clarity...

It would be nice to start with Bring Your Own Device before using the abbreviation, especially since this movement has several off springs like bringing your own phone, pc, laptop, etc. Not everyone keeps up, that's why we have you afterall...

Although I made quite a bit of fun about in the comment section of one of the earlier articles I do see the potential here, but in my opinion the thing shouldn't be focussed on bringing your own gear but to allow your personal broader and wider access to your data. That's the main key point, one which could have been made anyway. However, I'm a little sceptical about the massive touting people are doing because let's face it: giving access is one thing, using said access is something completely different. That takes someone who feels committed and involved with his job.

But yes, it can work. This reminds of a sysadmin job back in the 90'ish. It was an enterprise-like company, but not as big that we could afford 24hr monitoring of our services. We did have something as a hotline; one person who would "take watch" for the evening to make sure that if their were problems he could get into his car, go to the office and step in when required. Due to safety concerns there were no outside connections permitted, none what so ever. At once time the upper brass became a little more lenient and allowed a Unix machine to be accessible from the outside with limited connections to the internal network.

And so I designed a scheme to relay 3389/tcp data internally, and went through all the official channels to get permission for implementation, even more tiresome than developing the model itself. The result was that certain people, amongst myself, would now get strictly controlled access to the internal Windows server network from their home location (this was only allowed if you had a static IP address; both for easier administration as well as a form of signal to the upper brass that you were deeper involved with this technology).

The result should be obvious; many people, including myself, would easily logon during the evening in their own time to check if everything was still ok. This even prevented a disaster one day because one of my colleagues did the same, spotted something weird, immediately called the manager and prevented a major disaster due to a bug in one of the monitoring scripts. This guy was working from home, in his own time, because he felt that was important.

This BYOD thing is basically no different, apart from one thing... I fear that its main motivation isn't so much to involve more people into the way the company works, but to try and apply a cost reduction on hardware and making it more appealing for the crowd to use their own stuff. I can see how this will have a psychological effect too: "Ha, at least those asses from ICT will no longer be able to tell me how to use my computer!". Of course without an extra pay check for all the hours you put into getting the whole thing to work.

And there's the small issue, one which I made fun off in my previous post about this subject, that there's usually a good reason why ICT restricts several things on the network.

I think a lot of companies are going to find out that BYOD sounds awesome in theory, and that the first signs will also be very positive due to a large number of employers embracing the idea. But I think it will mostly be fuelled by the wrong motivations (cost reduction, less limitations) and that can come to haunt you....