BYOD
As my first article
in English, I’d like to discuss about BYOD. BYOD stands for Bring Your Own
Device and is considered a phenomenon on these days. Most probably I will not bring anything new
to this subject but I do have experience with BYOD and from the perspective of
those who are suffering with this phenomenon.
As Wireless Network
administrator, I saw our wireless demand grow up from about four thousand users
daily to about seven thousand users daily in less than two years. And sure
enough, we don’t have earned too many users during this time. What happened was
that most of our users have duplicated the number of device on their desks.
The result is
destructive from an Administrator point of view. We had to fight against a log
of trouble recently, starting with IP exhaustion and going to network
performance. Once we don’t have a BYOD well defined strategy yet, it gathering
for us a lot of complaint from users.
And the challenge has just begun. Once resolved the IP
exhaustion problem adding more DHCP scope on our DHCP server and so Interfaces
and AP group on our controllers, we ran into the issue of performance problem.
So upgrade is need.
Don’t matter which
strategy your company intend to adopt, it is probably that some kind of expense
and work around will be necessary. If the strategy is deny any device besides
corporative device, so some work around will be necessary or if the strategy is
allow those devices to access the Network so a lot of work must be done.
Performance,
security, maintenance, etc. must be considered. But this not stops here. Once
it is allowed that personal devices can access the corporate Network and to be
used in corporate activities, how can we establish where Network administrator
responsibility began and ends? If a user’s tablet is unable to access the
corporate internet or execute a corporate application, how can an Administrator
handle this problem once this device is used by the users outside the company? I
mean, with others networks configurations and application that may require, for
example, proxy to work whilst on the Corporate network it not. 100% sure, users
will be changing from an environment to another and will not be aware of
changing these configurations. And going
still farther, what about the need for format a device driver full of private
files and private apps? We can be
responsible if something went wrong with personal files and software? By giving
support on this device will be the Administrator fixing a corporative device
problem or a personal device problem? Just to give one example.
The big players
always say that BYOD will bring productivity to corporate environment. Is that
true? I think a lot of things must be
considered.
BYOD came and must stay independently how productive it is
or how hard to handle. Simply because this is what people expect from
technology. People want to be connected anytime, anywhere and BYOD is just a
consequence.
