Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Despite the “conservative” label it may get—especially from employees—this concern is a valid one. Allowing access to corporate systems and data through personal devices can open huge and varied gaps in information security. However, a combination of good governance and technology can minimize the risks and make the benefits (mobility, flexibility and productivity) worthwhile for most companies.
I say “most” companies because when thinking about opening the company to BYOD, the first exercise should be examining whether it really fits your business strategy. Regardless of the hype, BYOD is not for everyone. In some market segments, where the legal and/or marketing pressures on data confidentiality are very high, the risk may not be worth it. In other cases, the model may make sense only for some departments. The first step is to assess if BYOD makes sense for your organization.
If you decide to embrace BYOD, you must set policies and technologies that will support the process. One method that can be a great tool for enabling corporate BYOD adoption is virtualization. By using virtualized solutions (like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, known as VDI), the ICT manager maintains applications and data “at home,” or inside corporate boundaries, regardless of the platform used to access them— whether employees are using personal or corporate desktops, notebooks, tablets or smartphones.
By ensuring the ICT manager has control over the information and the homogeneity of the environment, virtualization complements the solution packages that are usually used to prepare for BYOD very well. Such packages should also include MDM (Mobile Device Management) and DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solutions as well as information backup systems.
The critical point of virtualization is connectivity, which can become a bottleneck and negatively impact user experience. Thus, updating and adapting the corporate network infrastructure—a mandatory action on any BYOD project—becomes even more relevant when you want to add the use of virtualization. A deep assessment and a battery of tests are needed to ensure that data access is transparent to the user.
