Why BYOD Won't Always Fly

The buzz in mobile circles these days is all about the "bring-your-own-device" (BYOD) movement. IT departments are sorely tempted to exit the mobility procurement business and just let employees use their personal wireless access devices at work. The primary pro-BYOD arguments go something like this:

• Most employees have their own smart phones and don't want to carry two devices. Letting them use their equipment to access corporate resources creates a happy work culture.
• Enterprises will save piles of money if they offload the capital expense of mobile devices onto their employees. And if they pay users a flat monthly stipend to cover work-related mobile service usage, they can ditch the administrative burden of scouring monthly wireless bills to figure out who owes what.

These assumptions are driving the popularity of BYOD.  "At this stage of the game, BYOD is a stone wheel rolling downhill," says Michael Finneran, principal of wireless consultancy dBrn Associates. "It's not stopping."

Yeah, But...

Still, some industry watchers maintain that the BYOD model will never fly for every company, every job, every worker and every device. Their reasons:

• The assumptions described don't hold up for every organization. Larger businesses might not save as much as they think, for instance. And the risk profiles and regulatory requirements of many preclude corporate data from leaving the organization on user-owned devices.

• BYOD doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing decision. There are multiple deployment models that give the enterprise varying levels of control over costs and security based on user group. For example, some workers deal with sensitive or regulated data that require corporate-owned and maintained devices; others need purpose-built custom devices, such as scanners, that are also non-BYOD candidates. "But perhaps there are some workers in the company who can perform certain tasks safely in a BYOD setup," says wireless expert Lisa Phifer, president of consultancy Core Competence and a Webtorials TechNotes contributing author.
  

In other words, company size, industry, risk profile and users' job descriptions all influence how an organization approaches its mobility usage policies. And they will likely prevent at least some companies from opening up 100% to a BYOD free-for-all.

Culture and Cost Arguments

Is keeping employees happy really driving mobile policy decisions?

"I don't know anyone making a primary BYOD decision based on morale," asserts David Schofield, partner at telecom consultancy Network Sourcing Advisors. He says companies are more compelled by the cost-saving argument.

Schofield says that businesses of 200 or fewer employees usually are a good fit for BYOD, because there aren't significant volume discounts to be left on the table and there are few technical issues to address.

"But larger companies are being sold a bill of goods: BYOD is not cheaper for them," he asserts. First, he maintains, it's the corporate-purchased devices that are eligible for volume equipment and service discounts. Also, IT will not fully rid itself of support issues and associated costs.

"BYOD doesn't stop users from coming to IT's door and [complaining that] they can't get their corporate email or that they've lost all their work data," Schofield says. "Users can't call the carrier for help, and you wouldn't want them to."

And what about the stipend for alleviating expense management and reimbursement headaches?

"I don't know any executive [mobile user] that would take $50 a month and say, 'We're good,'" says Michael Voellinger, executive vice president at Telwares, a telecom expense management firm in Pleasanton, Calif. "But if you increase the stipend, you whittle away at what you are saving."

Indeed, NSA's Schofield recently conducted an analysis at a company where users received a $100 monthly wireless stipend. But he found that the average employee wireless cost was actually just $66.  "The user was making money and the employer was losing money," he says.

If It Weren't for Security

James Buschkamp is a mobile infrastructure architect at Daimler Trucks North America who is struggling with the BYOD question. "We're looking at a centrally managed model but have business units all over the world, where there are different legal and security requirements," he explains.

Telwares' Voellinger acknowledges that if the industry could remove the security consideration from the equation, BYOD would be more palatable. "IT is salivating to virtualize the desktop, deliver services and get rid of hardware," he says.

But security remains the primary show stopper. And the chinks in an organization's armor usually start high up.

"Infiltration starts with top executives who get new devices and want their email, period," Voelllinger says. "They get access behind the firewall and become the weak link in the equation."