BYOD Another Big Challenge ahead for CIOs

With the evolution of technology, mobile devices are becoming an attractive choice for employees, which has given rise to a newer work culture called “BYOD” or “Bring Your Own Device”. BYOD is not only disrupting the traditional way technology is provisioned, paid for and used, it promises the dual benefits of simultaneously driving down IT costs while improving employee’s productivity and satisfaction. BYOD also offers tax benefits by shifting expense taxation from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operating expense (OpEx), which ultimately results in lowering income tax liability for employers.

A major driver of BYOD is the productivity advantage resulting from improved employee’s satisfaction and worker’s mobility, as well as lower costs of technology adoption and refresh. Nowadays, employees need to be up-to-date with every kind of information all the time and want to work from anywhere, at any time and on their devices of choice, both within and outside of the traditional corporate structure. It also makes things easier for the user by eliminating the need to carry multiple devices for personal and business use. Putting some more light on BYOD’s benefits to an organization, Arun Gupta, CIO, Cipla, says, “BYOD allows employees to consume information on their preferred devices which not only boost productivity with information on demand, but also provide some budgetary benefits where the enterprises do not have to invest in the devices.”

Arun Gupta, CIO, Cipla	Ajay Rambal, Head - IT, LG Electronics	Sandeep Kothari, Vice President – IT, Travel Food Services Pvt. Ltd	Sudhir Narang, MD - India, British Telecom

As the device is now chosen by the end-user, the efforts and costs related to training and maintenance of the device is transferred to the user. Nowadays, there are enormous device choices, BYOD breaks an important psychological barrier and increases the user’s comfort level, thus minimizing the risk associated with learning the functionality of the device. This, in turn, results in higher productivity levels and responsiveness that approaches a 24x7 basis. Prakash Arunachalam, Vice-President & Head – Delivery, Chennai Delivery Center, Virtusa Corporation, comments, “Today’s ‘Gen Y’ workforce, a workforce which embraces ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) including tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, is forcing organizations to put into place comprehensive mobile Business Intelligence (BI) strategies. In the future, more and more employees will demand use of their smart gadgets in the workplace.”

Challenges concerned with BYOD

It is not all sunshine and roses. There are a few potential downsides to the BYOD practice as well. As a greater volume of personal devices hit the corporate network, creating a bandwidth and access for each of them will pose a grave challenge for network administrators. The foremost of all is the security of data. Employee-owned devices that can access company’s sensitive information are more prone for being accessed via a public network, which increases the possibility of data being stolen, shared or fall in wrong hands. However, these risks can actually be eliminated and benefits of BYOD can be reaped by creating a BYOD strategy based on thorough requirement analysis and by taking standard compliance in account. “A challenging but important task for companies who utilize BYOD is to develop a policy that defines exactly what company’s sensitive information needs to be protected and which employee should have access to this information, and then to educate all employees on this policy,” exerts Sandeep Kothari, Vice-President – Information Technology, Travel Food Services Pvt. Ltd.

Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO, Syntel Inc	Prakash Arunachalam, Vice President and Head - Delivery, Chennai Delivery Center, Virtusa Corporation	Nitin Goyal, CTO, Applane

The licensing problems cannot be left out while discussing the challenges faced by CIOs with BYOD. An organization betting big on BYOD, must invest a chunk of capital on licensing. It is upon the CIOs to check that licences of the BYOD kits are in place. This is neither a time- effective nor a cost-effective option. Improper licensing can further lead to the introduction of further legal issues.

Another type of security breach can occur when an employee leaves the company. They do not have to give back the device. So, company’s applications and other data may still be present on their device. To avoid any such situation, proper planning and implementation of policies are a must to ensure that risks are minimized and everyone involved is clear on the steps to be followed. The most difficult challenge is always around people and change management. 

According to Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO, Syntel Inc, “It is critical to clearly articulate the behavioural expectations from employees and constantly keep them engaged until the technologies become part of the organization’s DNA.”

However, CIOs should not be looking to block access to personal web services. They should be looking to prioritize traffic for applications that are mission critical or for which latency means a reduction in quality of service. Ajay Rambal, Head – IT, LG Electronics, said that establishing effective governance mechanisms to ensure data privacy and security can be challenging when embracing a BYOD philosophy. In addition, advances in consumer technology and device heterogeneity are creating complexities that can undoubtedly turn into nightmares for IT, if not handled properly.

But if CIOs or the IT implementers face the above mentioned challenges into consideration before implementing the practice and put policies in place, BYOD can create a productive work environment. An integrated approach to BYOD policy management across device, application and network has the potential to enable CIOs to manage the policy complexity of BYOD and hence deliver a more consistent, simple experience to the employee. Sudhir Narang, Managing Director – India, British Telecom, opines, “The influx of new devices creates three key challenges for the enterprise network – WiFi coverage and capacity, traffic prioritization and security. Smart CIOs are working to ensure that they have a network that has the capacity to provide a good user experience on every mobile device accessing it.”

BYOD implementation

As far as BYOD implementation is concerned, Syntel has already embarked on its BYOD journey and extended this to its employees to access email infrastructure. Syntel currently has over 1,000 users who are enjoying the benefits of BYOD. There are plans in place to extend this to the next level and to implement a policy-based framework to provide access to other applications and information based on roles of the employees.

Virtusa has also institutionalized the BYOD work culture. They have a policy defined around BYOD. Virtusa IT teams ensure that all devices have the right level of virus protection. Also, they encourage their employees to install the V+ platform in their devices which is their enterprise social platform equivalent to Facebook, LinkedIn and others giving a seamless experience to their millennial workforce. They have adequate security measures in place which protect IP. Also, their BYOD policy has been defined carefully in such a way that the organization doesn’t have responsibility of any unauthorized sites access from employees’ own devices. Employees have direct contract with service providers which company has no obligation or contract for their usage.

Regarding BYOD implementation at Applane, Nitin Goyal, CTO of the company, said, “We have a proper policy in place to enable our employees to use devices of their choice without overlooking corporate security and business efficiency.”

At Cipla, Arun Gupta as a CIO has deployed BYOD for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) and allows these devices to connect to their network for selective access. This has gained good acceptance within Cipla. As they complete the refresh of their business-critical applications in 2014, they will explore new opportunities to enhance this offering.

At the end…

BYOD is a growing phenomenon that is greatly impacting how businesses are run. Organizations need to become much more agile and lean in the processes they use to develop and deploy enterprise-wide systems and services. They need to think about the power of social networking and co-creation. They need to stop fighting the Bring-Your-Own-Device  wars with their end-users and begin to use mobility, social and cloud technologies as a way to accelerate innovation, improve core business processes, create contextual services and harness the power and insights that exist in Big Data. 

satinder@varindia.com