Bring Your Own Device

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.