According to a report by the research organization Gartner, by 2018 70% of all professionals will be doing their business over personal smart devices. What does this mean to you – that by next year you could be one of the majority of workers working from your own smartphone or tablet. This concept has generally been referred to as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).
If this BYOD trend plays out as Gartner has predicted it will, this will mean some major changes in the workplace that could have been difficult to implement at first, without causing unnecessary friction.
Whose Device is it Anyway?
It is easy to understand how this can be a welcome and implemented with many different employers – BYOD actually works well with lower infrastructure investments. Using BYOD, organizations can trust and even mandate that all employees take care of their own hardware considerations. If applied alongside UC networks with remote hosting, YOD could mean that many organizations will not need to buy their own equipment anymore.
By the same measure there is another important point that needs to be considered before continuing with this frame of thought. This is the fact that many different organizations are still providing their employees with tablets and smartphones. This raises the question of whether or not this new workforce will be powered by organization owned equipment or personal devices.
It may be possible that they organizations and companies will be supplying these devices, soonheless they will still have more control over who is allowed to access these networks. This in itself can help to reduce the frequency and quantity of security breaches.
Security Concerns- Will Organizations Still Invest in Hardware?
Concern network security if companies do include BYOD practices in their employment techniques that they exercise more control over what is accessing their networks. This brings up another question of whether the employees of a company will want to submit their personal devices to corporate regulations, or if they would even want to use company infrastructure.
But as long as there is a threat of hackers targeting personal devices and company networks this will be a persistent concern and one that will cause organizations and to look for better hardware options, like the BYOD.
What Sort of Work's Being Done?
The proponents of a massive BYOD push seem to be prevaricating around the question of whether or not employees can ven process all their work over these devices. While these devices have been found capable of handling all sorts of important organizational tasks, they are still sadly lacking in their capacity to address regular business work like data entry and designs. Whether or not YOD will actually be able to take its place in the workplace as predicted by the Gartner Company, will largely depend on how these devices are developed and created in the near future.
If BYOD is ever able to grow to the capacity that Gartner proposed will really depend on the capacity these devices have to grow or the development of peripheral features or the creation of hybrid devices capable of greater workloads.
The great advances made in software technology is really insignificant if these devices lack the capacity to operate them.
So, in the end it does seem like a BYOD future is on the horizon – soonheless, the day that these current options will be able to completely replace the various computers and laptops in use today is still a long way off. It is also unrealistic to assume that the day companies will not have to be maintaining the devices on which their business relationships is also far off.
The whole playing field and key players will have to be taken in and upgraded before this dream can be made a reality.