How can IT departments quickly support new devices brought in by employees? How can IT teams allow users to adopt these devices within their existing infrastructures? Addressing many of these questions, Opus Research recently published a report noting five rules for survival in the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) era.
The report and the challenges raised by BYOD were the subject of a video interview with Dan Miller, Opus senior analyst and author of the report, and Tim Moynihan, vice president of Empirix. They discussed how BYOD survival starts with IT departments accepting the consumerization of IT and how to ensure network quality to meet the impact of increased video demand, among other highlights. Check out the interview:
As noted by Miller, the five rules for BYOD survival are:
- Recognize that everyone has a better mousetrap—Mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, are a “considered purchase.” They are highly personalized and vital to the individuals that buy them. They are also becoming more and more affordable.
- Make it easy to discover and add functions—Think of each device as a gateway to enterprise resources to boost individual productivity, communications, and collaboration, but recognize that you’ll be asking Mobile Device Management (MDM) resources to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of keeping applications up-to-date, secure and compatible.
- Use “Big Data” and “Analytics” to get Predictive—Personal data and metadata (concept tagging, etc.) are natural byproducts of employee collaboration. They can be used to make diverse workgroups and individuals more productive and more “in control” of the projects they are undertaking through their mobile devices.
- Balance security and convenience—Each device has its own distinctive characteristics and attributes. These determine the threat level they pose to enterprise network integrity. IT experts recommend a tri-partite approach: some devices are approved “Platform” devices that are fully supported; others are supported at the “application” level but not the device level; and the last group is supported on a fee-based, charge-back basis.
- Bullet-proof the underlying networks—As employees discover and define new use cases and applications for mobile interactions, their expectations are for a single network to flat-out work without interruptions or latencies. That means network assurance is crucial not only between and among mobile devices but also among the back-office systems and databases that are invoked during the course of person-to-person interactions.
