The consumerization of IT and the accompanying bring-your-own-device trend is emerging as a major problem for businesses. Workers using their own smartphones and tablets to get the job done pose a significant security risk, and plenty of uncertainty exists around the best way to handle the movement. According to a recent blog post from Forrester Research's David Johnson, ignoring BYOD is not the answer and formal policies to support the trend are becoming important.
According to Forrester, employees purchasing their own IT systems for work spent an average of more than $1,250 on hardware and approximately $550 on software. Roughly 42 percent of those polled said they did this because they like the devices they use personally so much that they wanted to use them for work. Another 27 percent said their employers don't give them the tools they need to succeed, and so they went out and bought their own. The problem is that almost half said their businesses would not approve of personal device use, if they knew about it.
The news source said this is not an uncommon trend because workers care more about advancing their career by getting their job done effectively than they do about following IT's rules. Furthermore, tech-savvy employees can find plenty of ingenious ways to work around IT. As a result, organizations need to develop formal policies that help them support BYOD without creating risk from having data stored on employee-owned smartphones and tablets.
Data center outsourcing services could solve a lot of BYOD problems. Beginning with cloud services, organizations can put applications and IT Infrastructure solutions in a hosted environment. Data is then stored in the cloud and delivered to end users, ensuring that no sensitive corporate data actually resides on the endpoint.
This policy dramatically improves device security, but often needs to be accompanied by network upgrades. Using a combination of web acceleration and content delivery network systems, organizations can create a direct, secure and high-performance network tunnel between the service provider and the corporate network. This provides an added layer of protection and performance, while also allowing businesses to focus almost all of their security efforts on the internal network systems delivering data to end users. Virtual private network infrastructure can pay dividends in this area.
Between cloud and network solutions, data center outsourcing is capable of offering businesses a secure and high-performance foundation for mobile computing, allowing them to overcome the perils of IT consumerization and better support their employees.
