Organisations have been and are being focused on enabling enterprise mobility for its workforce. This helps the company to transform employee performance, mobilize business processes and deploy apps to improve productivity and enhance customer service. Companies can’t run the risk of going late in adoption of Enterprise mobility. With BYOD policy in place in many of the companies, almost all their employees are mobile-enabled/equipped now.
With BYOD, the policy allows employees to bring their personally owned mobile device to their workplace and connect to the corporate network and work on them. And for this policy(pure BYOD), there is no restriction on the device, technology, OS version etc. Considering the challenges in implementing the BYOD policy to provide secure and managed services by the IT department, we see a change in the "Your Own Device" policy.
Is it a true BYOD?
We all would have heard about BYOD. But is it a true BYOD? Or is it more of a CYOD? If we closely look at the policy, we can find the difference. Let us have at look at it.
What CYOD is?
Choose Your Own Device from a list of pre-approved devices. This means that employees can bring in devices as long as they are on the approved list. The IT department tests and approves the latest versions of the popular devices that can be managed securely where it can deploy and certify company apps which the employees can access anywhere. This list provides a choice to the employee to choose the device of their preference. This makes it a managed-BYOD(MBYOD) where the enterprise can have control over the corporate data in these devices. In general, employee own the choice of the device from the given list. But who owns the device? That varies according to the policies.
BYOD vs CYOD: Choose or/and Bring your own device?
BYOD offers freedom to use any device as there is no pre-approved list restriction by IT whereas CYOD doesn't give that freedom. With CYOD, offering employees a choice of approved devices will provide more control for IT to provide secure and managed services compared to allowing them to bring any smartphone or tablet they want. Most of the companies test and approve the latest versions of the popular devices as early as possible thus giving a wide range of choice for the employees to choose from. With the right range of devices, CYOD may provide the same employee satisfaction offered by BYOD. Thus CYOD bridge the gap between employee choice and employer responsibility to manage and secure the IT environment.
CYOD: Who owns the device?
The different "Your Own Device" policies may fall into the following categories.
- BYOD - Pure BYOD. Employee can bring in any device.
- CBYOD (Choose and Bring Your Own Device) - It is a CYOD policy, where the employee can choose and bring the device available in the list of approved devices. In both 1 & 2, employee is the owner of the device.
- In this policy, either the company provides the device or provides a reimbursement(with a limit) to the employee on purchase of a device under CYOD policy. If the cost is more than the eligible reimbursement limit, the employee can spend extra money from his pocket.This allows the employee to buy the device of his choice even if the device costs above the reimbursement limit. But here, unlike 1 & 2, the owner of the device would be the company until the end of employment contract, after which the employee can own the device with no corporate access. Since 2 & 3 comes under CYOD, company has more control and can remotely wipe corporate data and access, in case of loss of the device or end of employment contract.
- COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) - In this policy, the device is owned by the company unlike 1, 2 & 3. Employee can still choose the device under CYOD policy. With COPE, employees can use corporate devices for personal use.
The future of "Your Own"
Though we have different acronyms or phrases for different policies, "Your Own Device" may still be continued to known as BYOD for sometime. We do not know how long the "Device" part in BYOD stays. It could be an entirely new "Your Own" policy that may become the trend in future. It may be "Your Own Interface" with "Your Own Cloud".
"Your Own Interface" with BYOI / CYOI
The future could be the virtual interfaces that provide virtual laser displays and keyboards. So there is no physical device here. It could be virtually created and projected to work with. And you might have the provision to create or customize the virtual interface of your choice. Be it virtual displays of different look and feel, and size. Be it virtual keyboards of different languages. This enables users to create/switch virtual displays and keyboards at their will. It can be BYOI ( Bring Your Own Interface )/ CYOI ( Choose Your Own Interface ). The metadata for creating the virtual interface could be stored in and accessed from the cloud. And the actual data/content would be residing and processing may be happening at a different place. It may be "Your Own Cloud" with BYOC / CYOC.
"Your Own Cloud" with BYOC / CYOC
- BYOC(Bring Your Own Cloud) - where employees can utilize their own personal cloud or third-party cloud services instead of the company's own cloud services to perform their work.
- CYOC(Choose Your Own Cloud) - where employees can choose from an approved list of cloud services and utilize it to perform work-related and personal tasks.
I am just thinking wild and crazy :wink: Soaring to new heights of innovation, it may not come to the wildest of our dreams now, what goes "Your Own" in future for BYO*/CYO* or for some other YO*. The world of innovative thinking has no limits. You can think big, think wild and think crazy :wink:
Read: Enterprise Mobility | Mobile Platform | Cloud Computing | Business Trends
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