June 5, 2012 at 8:14 Bring Your Own Device - the first results of corporate strategies
The topic of confronting “corporate standards” and “personal effectiveness” is gaining momentum. It's not for nothing that PC World even calls BYOD (Bring Your Own Device - not to be confused with Bring Your Own Drink) the most terrifying acronym for IT professionals - corporate standards seem to lose the battle with the "all I carry with myself" policy. What theses can be given in defense of each policy:
| Following Corporate Standards | Bring your own device |
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If you can’t win, head it, counted in some companies, and decided to implement BYOD policy.
To begin with - some statistics from Cisco - according to the company, its annual savings from BYOD are 300-1300 US dollars per employee, depending on his position
IBM
According to IBM CIO Jeanette Horan , the introduction of BYOD in 2010, which allowed employees to use any device for corporate purposes, did not save money, but increased the hassle. Five thousand of her colleagues had to deal with the zoo of applications and software that were beyond the control of the IT service.
First, the company compiled a guide to applications that can be used and which should be avoided. To reduce the temptation to use unsafe services (for example, file sharing), IBM developed and began to accustom employees to their own counterparts. For the most part, employees were sympathetic to safety requirements. And the most annoying of them was an eight-digit alphanumeric password for unlocking devices.
Today, some 120,000 users log into the IBM network from mobile devices. 80,000 of them independently service and pay for communications, the remaining 40,000 use corporate smartphones. The most popular gadgets are Google Android, Apple iPhone and iPad and Blackberry. It is also worth clarifying that not all devices and platforms were approved for work, as they did not meet the safety requirements. The company has also compiled a guide to popular devices and their properties to help select the most suitable models.
Among the components of the BYOD program is the Lotus Notes Traveler mobile application , which allows you to use corporate mail and a calendar. As well as the Tivoli Endpoint Manager platform, for remote management of client equipment (as the name implies) and its monitoring in real time.
IBM can erase information from the phone if it is lost, or if an employee quits. Therefore, when it became possible to delete only corporate data (for example, mail) without touching personal data, employees were extremely happy.
SAP
According to the company itself, SAP has become one of the pioneers in the use of tablets in its business - both developers and sales managers.
Today, SAP uses 40,000 mobile devices worldwide, 18,000 of which are tablets. Whether it’s a corporate or personal device used in the work of SAP employees, it is under the full control of the company's IT service. Access to corporate information, including mail and mobile applications, may be blocked at any time. For safe management of user devices, the company uses the Afaria solution - with its help, data is backed up, updated, encrypted, remotely deleted, and also optimized during transmission (which is important for low bandwidth).
VMware
6,000 employees took 90 days to migrate from corporate devices to their own. Such a bold and aggressive at first glance step was actually the result of a compromise. On the one hand, employees themselves complained about the obsolescence and / or limited choice of corporate equipment. On the other hand, the finance department was not happy with VMware’s excessive IT costs. According to CIO of Mark Egan, the option between corporate standards and personal equipment is a nightmare for the IT department. Therefore, the Vmware policy has become mandatory.
Employees were faced with the choice: to retain their corporate mobile device, fully taking over its maintenance, incl. communication costs, or purchase a gadget that supports the BlackBerry Enterprise Server orActiveSync . In the future, VMware reimbursed the cost of mobile communications in the range of 70 or 250 dollars per month, depending on the position. Mark Egan himself noted that as a result of all these changes, he himself began to spend less by 30%.
Not surprisingly, the transition was painful - the first time it took to extinguish "popular anger" about the waste of its own resources on what used to be in the company's area of responsibility. By the way, the corporate social network provided tangible help. Employees and “steam released”, and were able to help each other with the same choice of tariff plans. And the IT service did not have to answer typical questions again and again.
VMware plans to begin migration to personal laptops next quarter. Here, the company will resort to using its own products for application virtualization, cloud storage, as well as the corporate App Store.
MasterCard
BYOD program started at MasterCard a little over a year ago, and already 2000 out of 6,700 employees took part in it. Today, the program is designed for employees to use the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. All stored and transmitted data is encrypted, and to enter the corporate network, authentication is required each time.
In case of loss of the gadget, only corporate information is blocked and deleted from the device - taking care of personal data is in the user's area of responsibility.
Intel
In mid-2011, two years after the start of the BYOD program, already 58% of Intel employees (30,000 people) used personal smartphones for business purposes.
The implementation of BYOD in Intel went through several stages:
- discussion of the initiative by stakeholders - HR, legal department, engineers;
- open discussion among employees (covered over 8,000 people);
- development of security measures - how to best protect corporate data by spending an adequate amount of resources;
- choice of supported platforms - the company focused on 5 popular OS;
- formalizing BYOD policy and communicating it to employees;
- creation within the framework of the service infrastructure of an easy-to-use web portal for applications and employee consultations
- the actual implementation of the program and the subsequent "pulse on the pulse" as updates and new operating systems become available - all software passes the certification procedure and receives a verdict on the possibility of its use.
The procedure for switching to your own device involves an online request to the IT service and receiving confirmation of the possibility of using the gadget and accepting the conditions and restrictions, after which the employee will be sent instructions on how to configure the device. To determine what corporate data can be accessed from a personal mobile for a particular employee, the company has created an algorithm that takes into account five access levels, security features provided by the phone itself, and “detractors profiles”.
Prior to the implementation of the program, 80% of Intel’s expenses for mobile access went to pay monthly bills for communication services. Under the BYOD program, the company transferred the choice of both the device and the tariff plan to the area of responsibility of employees, which allowed us to optimize the company's costs. Intel has come up with 3 financing schemes - in 55% of cases an employee pays for everything, in 35% - a company, in 10% a hybrid scheme is applied - an employee buys a smartphone from his pocket, and the company makes monthly payments.
According to employee reviews, Intel estimated that the ability to continuously communicate with colleagues and customers from home, or while traveling, on average saves each employee 47 minutes a day, which is 1.7 million hours per quarter per company. At the same time, the company believes that corporate security has even improved - thanks to control over what has been encountered before, but not monitored. This year, the company plans to allow the use of laptops for business purposes.
Citrix systems
In 2008, Citrix Systems launched a three-year BYOD program, announcing its willingness to compensate $ 2,100 for employees to purchase computers that are convenient for them. It was not forbidden to pay extra money from your pocket for the model, which many took advantage of, adding up to half the amount. According to the results of the first 18 months since the launch of the campaign, 1,400 people joined it.
Sergey Khalyapin, the head of system engineers at the Moscow representative office of the company, in a recent interview with Open Systems added that even if an employee already has a computer, the allocated money can be spent on anything.
Solutions are built on the basis of proprietary technologies and services, including, for example, XenDesktop virtual desktops and XenClient client hypervisors. Remote access to corporate resources is provided through the Citrix Receiver application. Having received carte blanche to work with any devices and operating systems, sales managers also got the opportunity to demonstrate the functionality of the products “without leaving the cash desk”.
To ensure security, the company uses a few simple rules:
- use proprietary file-sharing analogs - acquired by ShareFile and Podio.
- store data on a server or use file sharing tools
- Connect to corporate resources through Citrix Access Gateway or Citrix NetScale - after checking the credentials, the user may be limited in functionality.
The financial goal of the campaign was to reduce the cost of buying and supporting user devices by 20%. Judging by the information in various interviews, the goal has been achieved. The company's savings amounted to about $ 500 per piece in three years, taking into account the scholarship paid.
Colt
At the British television company Colt, the BYOD Choice program was tested on 200 employees, after which the opportunity for others to abandon corporate technology in favor of personal technology became available to others. Initially, 10% of the 5,500 employees took advantage of the offer, but today already 1,800 people have tried the option of using any devices for work purposes using a virtual desktop.
Colt does not subsidize the purchase of computers for personal use, but as part of the corporate laptop migration program, employees are paid 1,000 euros for three years to support and maintain personal computers. Thus, the company managed to save on redistributing the budget between updating the operating system of corporate computers and supporting virtualization and the Choice program.
Well, our modest experience.
The BYOD concept, although it does not have a formal status, has gradually become the norm in Gars Telecom.
Notebooks:
- If an employee needs a new laptop, he writes to the IT department his requirements and wishes (for power, monitor diagonal, aesthetic requests, etc.). Within the framework of a certain budget (depends on the status of the employee), the company selects several models to choose from. There is also a co-financing scheme in which part of the cost of a laptop is offset by the company.
- Gradually, some employees switched to Apple products, and the IT department had to integrate devices into the corporate network
Phones:
- Since in our country there is no telephone connection to the operator, the company easily incurs the payment of corporate communications for employees within the established limits (from 1000 rubles / month), depending on the nature of the work and the position of the employee.
- Back in 2006, corporate mobile smartphones based on Windows Mobile (with the remote content management function) began to provide all technical specialists working on trips.
Summary
BYOD is an obvious trend that is unreasonable to close our eyes. The key economic effect is still not in the mobile devices themselves, but in the ability of employees to work remotely, regardless of place and time. And the main factor in a successful project is the organization’s ability to listen and hear its own employees.