NASSCOM Tech Series : BYOD 'Strike the right balance'

NASCCOM in an effort to revive their tech series, organised the event titled 'Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Strike the right balance' at the CITRIX R&D Bangalore office.

The meet was well attended with representations from Vitamap, Samsung, Ericsson, Brillio, Avaya and GE among others. The speakers were from Sales and Product teams at Citrix. Most of the audience were looking forward to understand BYOD from a technical as well as a business perspective.

Mobile workspaces are relatively new and do not have a standardized approach among existing players. Jargon such as ‘Bring Your Own Device’(BYOD), ‘Allow Your Own Device’ (AYOD) or even ‘Choose Your Own Device’ (CYOD) are floating around. Whether organisations allow any device or mandate a few devices, the onus is on providing a secure means to allow employees to ‘work anywhere’. Customization and collection of service providers is the call of the season to bring in synergies for those who service BYOD policies.

While commercial apps pay high attention to user experience, organisations are talking of user empowerment with any device any location access.





Users expect the look and feel of a commercial app while being able to perform activities they would from the office desk. A business can use anywhere between 30-15000 apps! The dilemma however, is how many of these are useful to employees on their mobile device? Who are the most likely group of workers to use a certain class of apps? and the complexity of managing and administering security on all devices across geographies.

Various groups within the organisation have separate mandates. IT is looking at a scalable and self-serviced, secure environment while the business is looking at increased productivity and higher employee satisfaction and the CFO’s office is looking at the financial impact. Buy in from each of the groups is the key to success. The presentation dealt with the common pitfalls in security that can be avoided and means to build a foolproof solution that allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Security and convenience are often at loggerheads when dealing with devices that are not on premise. A panel of security experts, product development and business users revealed, the basis for security remains the same whether the device is on premise or elsewhere. The trick is to have protocols on the server side which will quarantine the device entirely, an app or a file depending on how critical the threat is. Once again, the needs of organisations may differ with the nature of their business.

A pharmaceutical company or a financial company which come under the keen eye of regulations may choose to have only a few groups to use a mobile device with multiple layers of security while a social company may have a slightly less relaxed policy for B-Y-O device management. The panel stressed that, irrespective of the nature of business and policies, all data must be encrypted and make the user more informed for businesses to see the advantages of a BYOD enabled workforce.     

In Conclusion, BYOD is a reality that will become a way of life for most organisations. Businesses with field force are one of the first set of organisations to adopt BYOD . Saving time, increased productivity  and better control while keeping the workforce connected and in sync are a few advantages that #mEdge users have reported.   

#mEdge is a secure and easy-to-use productivity mobile tool developed by Vitamap.