MAY JUN 17

T E C H N O L O G Y
BYOD ? Bring Your Ow n Device Reducing
Business IT Cost s
If you keep an eye on technology news or future IT business trends, then you may have heard the term ?BYOD? (Bring Your Own
Device). There is a lot of discussion about BYOD because it has the great potential to drastically reduce business IT hardware
costs, simplifying IT management while helping the environment.
In 2016, 82% of adults (41.8 million) in Great
Britain used the internet every day or
almost every day. This was an increase from
78% in 2015 and more than double the
reported estimate of 35% in 2006[1]. Have
you ever counted how many computer
devices there are in your possession? I
consider myself to have typical IT needs for
my job and home life: including old unused
devices we have 5 laptops, 3 tablets and 5
smartphones in our household. That?s 13
potential ways to access the Internet, which
is essential for most peoples?work these
days. It would be much better to reduce
these devices to an adequate number,
saving costs and CO2 through reduced
manufacturing.
It has been standard practice for many
years for an employer to issue their
employees with company laptops for their
work. They also need to insure them, secure
them from viruses, and manage and
maintain them either through an in-house
team or external IT support companies. In
addition they need to replace them when
they get lost or stolen, or simply become
outdated, not to mention the cost of lost
business data. Typically businesses refresh
their IT hardware every 3 to 4 years due to
them falling behind in the required
specification to run the latest applications.
This has a direct cost implication, and also
ties in with the UK accountancy rules that all
IT equipment depreciates to a value of zero
after 3 years.
With BYOD, the employee would use their
own computer to work on: this would be an
amazing disrupter to every business as it
would remove a lot of the cost and
headache of managing IT hardware. It
would allow the business to regain focus on
its main functions. So why hasn?t it taken off
yet? Well, it causes a few challenges, namely
security and integration with current
company IT infrastructure - e.g. how does a
business ensure it?s protected from viruses
brought in by external equipment, or how
do they enable access to and protection of
sensitive company files and email? There
are fairly simple solutions to these on the
first point as we have all connected our
devices to a guest WiFi somewhere and
anti-virus software can be implemented as
well. Deskt op as a Service (DaaS) is a
solution on a larger scale. This is where the
employee uses any standard web browser
(on their own device) to log in to their ?work
laptop.?Their work desktop and all of the
company data that they need is stored in
the Cloud, fully secured and can?t be
impacted by the local device. File transfer to
and from the local device can be managed
per user, so if the laptop is stolen, no
company data is lost as it never leaves the
Cloud. What?s more, you can use any
computer anywhere in the world to login to
your work desktop.
The global BYOD and Enterprise Mobility
market is expected to over double from
$35bn in 2016 to $73bn in 2021[2]: this
marries well with the fact that workstation
desktop sales have been falling by an
average of 9.8% year on year since their
peak in 2011[3]. There are more people
working on laptops and mobile devices such
as tablets and smartphones. The increasing
demand of w orking rem ot ely is also
playing a key role in the development of
BYOD practices.
In 2014 the UK government released a set
of guidelines for the implementation of
BYOD which are a good starting point but
don?t consider all of the technical solutions
to BYOD such as DaaS.
For example, it states that, ?the legal
responsibility for protecting personal
information is with the data controller, not the
device owner. The Information Commissioner?s
Office (ICO) can impose fines of up to £500,000
for serious data breaches.?Therefore the
business is still responsible for controlling
sensitive and personal data, further ratified
in the updated General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) in 2016 through the EU
which is now law and has stronger rules and
implications on how data is source,
managed and protected.
If you would like to know more about the
contents of this article or about Cloud
services, please contact us at
contact@miranex.com.
Edward Green, Managing Director. Miranex
Limited.
[1] Reference Office of National Statistics [2]
Reference Marketsandmarkets via
Computerdealernews [3] Reference IDC
25.