By: Bill Waldron, Borderless Network Practice Manager
How you answer that question could very well be an indicator of how behind the curve you are, when it comes to meeting the expectations of today’s connected workforce. The connected populace in general have already arrived at a state of mind where using their personal devices with wireless coverage is expected, and will usually not think twice about choosing one entity over another based on the availability of a Wi-Fi network for their personal devices. We saw this trend take hold in education a couple years ago. I’ve spoken with IT stakeholders in higher education who are still frantically scrambling to provide widespread wireless coverage for personal devices because students and parents have started putting the availability of Wi-Fi at or near the top of the list of considerations when choosing a college.
That same mentality has also entered the workplace, often to the extent that CIOs and IT Directors lose control of the enterprise. As employees demand the use of their personal devices, decisions on whether or not to support personal devices on the network are often being made at the executive level. These demands can be fraught with security concerns, un-budgeted expenses, and a heavy strain on IT resources as they struggle to adapt.
Enter BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Yes, I know it is yet another marketing term, but the advantage of some marketing terms is that they sometimes package otherwise disjointed solutions into a well-defined solution that essentially helps you cover all of the bases. That is precisely what BYOD does. It gives us a roadmap to make sure we are accounting for the costs, security, and resource considerations we may have otherwise overlooked. When employees bring their mobile devices into the workplace they tend to use resources like email, the corporate network via Wi-Fi or over VPN, shared documents on servers, and enterprise apps; uses that are essential to productive employees.
The notion of most employees using their personal devices for work is practically a foregone conclusion. Instead of resisting this trend, responsible IT organizations see BYOD as a means to boost employee productivity and take advantage of todays always connected lifestyle. But what happens when a company’s sensitive information gets into the wrong hands? What happens if a device goes missing or an employee leaves the company? While BYOD can be liberating, there are important security implications for every organization to address.
The SANS Institute looked broadly at enterprises implementing BYOD and found a surprising lack of oversight. Less than 10% of respondents were fully aware of the mobile devices on their networks, 31% said they did not have BYOD usage and security policies, 26% only “sort of” had policies in place, 24% said that BYOD policies were added to existing security regulations, 17% had stand-alone BYOD policies, and 3% did not know what rules, if any, governed BYOD at their organization.
Given the above statistics, it’s easy to see the real value in marketing initiatives such as BYOD. They give us focus. They sometimes even provide the roadmap to readiness for us. The Cisco BYOD Smart Solution provides a comprehensive approach to effectively design, manage, and control the access of a Bring Your Own Device network. Whether its an enterprise level customer using Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Prime Infrastructure, or a smaller to mid-level customer using Cisco Meraki cloud-based BYOD solutions, its nice to have that roadmap out there to help us make sense of it all.
As the Borderless Network Practice Manager for ABS, I have personally spent numerous hours over the past year or so preparing my team and the company for meeting our customer’s BYOD needs. We’re even “walking the walk” by designing and deploying our own Cisco Meraki BYOD solution internally. Marketing term? Yes. Useful? Absolutely. Smart solutions can generate smart networks. Let’s get you prepared for this thing!
