Bring Your Own or Choose Your Own? The reality of living in a Mobile-first world
When discussing mobility in the workplace, bring your own device (or BYOD) is the strategy that most often springs to mind in recent times. However, while businesses on the American side of the Atlantic seem perfectly happy with BYOD, this isn’t often the same case in Europe, with only the Middle East and Africa mirroring the same level of adoption witnessed in North America.
A Tech Pro Research survey conducted in January 2015 recorded that 74 per cent of US-based businesses have already adopted, or are making plans for a BYOD strategy, whereas the same report also found that this trend is not nearly as prevalent in Europe. In fact a recent IDC survey conducted showed that just 36 per cent of businesses in Europe had a formal policy in place. Security concerns, privacy laws, cultural differences have hampered adoption of BYOD in Europe. Thankfully, there are options to solve this problem with an alternative strategy, known as Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), where a middle ground option is provided to the end user by means of a list of approved mobile devices to choose from. This provides the choice of devices to end users, maximising productivity, and enables IT to remain in some control of the environment.
This alternative strategy means that CYOD is gaining momentum as a more effective course of action, and can result in some key benefits.
With CYOD, you can provide your employees a pre-defined range of devices to choose from, making it much easier to monitor security: in short, a consistent policy can be developed for a known range of devices. This slightly reduces the choice on offer to your employees, but it’s an effective compromise, especially as employees in Europe are increasingly likely to expect companies to pay for mobile devices that they use for work purposes.
European privacy laws also make CYOD a more attractive option for businesses. With rules in place in countries across Europe to protect employees from having their actions monitored through their own mobile devices, the legality of BYOD and managing corporate data and applications on personal phones can be a bit of a grey area. CYOD, on the other hand, eliminates these pitfalls because the company itself owns the device. With CYOD it is easier for organisations to implement a consistent security policy.
The future looks even more exciting with Wear Your Own Device, entering the arena as an alternative or companion to BYOD or CYOD. The number of wearable devices shipped in 2015 will be 173 per cent higher than in 2014. While still only in its infancy, WYOD opens up a whole new world of experiences and an interesting new dimension to the BYOD vs CYOD equation. At HID Global, we believe that wearable devices will rapidly gain traction in the workplace as the number, and types of wearables increases and as more employees expect to be able to use them for work purposes.
I am a big believer in mobility. Mobility will empower all of us to be more efficient, more collaborative and just plain better at what we do. Sure, there are challenges with increased mobility in the workforce; BYOD has seen success in in the US, but European businesses have not been nearly as eager to adopt the strategy. Making the BYOD strategy 100% watertight is a big task due to the sheer number and variations of available devices. For Europe, CYOD is a highly viable alternative which can alleviate these issues by limiting the number of devices a company needs to monitor. And, for Europe in particular – and its stringent laws and cultural emphasis on privacy – it also possesses a crucial legal benefit which BYOD can’t offer.
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