Today’s news round-up is all about four letters that continue to make quite a splash in the enterprise scene – B, Y, O and D. The concept may sound simple enough, but if you’ve been following our news round ups, you know that this trend is a hotly debated issue in the tech world. Let’s get started on security – a big BYOD concern.
While security has been written about numerous times before, it’s been viewed as a main concern of BYOD. To stir up the debate a bit is an article from David Needle at TabTimes. Needle’s article outlines a new survey released by AirTight Networks that reveals IT security pros’ concerns about BYOD. An interesting statistic from the survey says that 61 percent of IT security professionals actually see BYOD as an opportunity to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Many respondents still expressed concerns about security threats, which is why it’s so important to deploy a comprehensive BYOD policy in the workplace.
A comprehensive BYOD policy benefits the workplace in more ways than one. Not only does it help reduce the amount of security threats, but it also can actually help make workers more productive. Tom Kaneshige wrote an article about BYOD productivity on Macworld. Kaneshige says that employees who are allowed to use their own device will be more apt to customize it with productivity tools and keep it on them at all times, opposed to an employee that is required to use a less customizable company provided device. He also provides an example of how BYOD has increased productivity at power management company, Eaton Corp. The CIO measured worker productivity gains after switching to BYOD and saw the company’s order intake rates decrease from days and weeks to hours and minutes.
Last on our BYOD round-up, is an article from Colin Neagle on ITworld. Neagle addresses the issue of how BYOD is affecting the popularity of Windows Phone 7. As one might imagine, the Windows phone is truly an enterprise phone and many workplace IT administrators find the work-friendly features appealing. But with BYOD continuing to rise in popularity, end-users are increasingly grabbing for their own Androids and iPhones, leaving Windows’ new phone lagging behind the competition.
Have a good weekend!
