BYOD User-Driven Movement, Not Secure Mobile Device Strategy

Regardless if you call it the consumerisation of IT or the bring your own device (BYOD) movement, the trend of people using their own mobile devices to access corporate resources is unstoppable.

Some users (guests) simply want to check their social networks, while others (employees) want to connect to their organizations’ sales applications and other business apps while on the road. Many organizations have tried to fight the tide, but it’s a losing battle. 

Let’s be honest — users are controlling the IT security agenda, like it or not. They love their devices and the apps on them, and they want to use them at work. Clearly, vendors and enterprises alike have recognized this is more than a fad and are fueling the secondary driving force behind BYOD: the potential to make and/or save money by capitalizing on the movement. 

Allowing employees to bring their own devices to work means cost-savings for corporations as it gives them the ability to avoid the expense of buying or leasing the devices themselves. These savings do come at a cost however; personal devices still need to be controlled and managed — hence the enormous vendor revenue opportunity. 

Make no mistake about it, it won’t be long before there will be unfathomable numbers of these devices to control and manage throughout the corporate world. In a recent report, Gartner predicted that 90% of businesses will support corporate applications on mobile devices by 2014. And Cisco survey data suggests that we can expect to see 3.47 devices per person in 2015 and a whopping 6.58 devices per person in 2020. This begs the question: How many devices per person will the enterprise ultimately need to manage? 

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the basic options for addressing the BYOD phenomenon. With minor investments and relatively simple changes to infrastructure and processes, organizations can choose to:



– Block all devices that have not been provisioned by the corporation. 


– Block none of the devices, regardless of their origins (note: I specifically chose this phrase over “enable all devices” as it better expresses the risk involved in letting anything access the network).

– Or, control access for some of the devices, granting or blocking access to resources based on need and risk.



Addressing BYOD by itself makes little to no sense as BYOD is not really a business objective, but rather a movement, not to mention a very narrow way of looking at connected systems. Therefore, it seems likely that the BYOD marketing phrase will lose its charm within a few years, if not sooner, leaving us with the real challenge: secure mobility. The real need is to enable secure access to only relevant resources from any and all securely managed devices and locations. In other words, while it’s important for organizations to manage device access to their networks, it’s even more important to manage what these devices can and can’t do while they have access, an approach combining “mobile device management” (MDM) and “mobile application management” (MAM). – www.networksasia.net