Gadgets like iPhone, iPad fuel trendto BYOD

When Fiaaz Walji was hired by the Internet security company Websense six years ago, he had no choice nevertheless to work on a company-issued Dell laptop computer.

Last year when he hired two new salespeople and told them to see the company's information research department to get their tech devices, the two declined.

The new employees

Fortunately for the new employees, Websense is among companies at the leading edge of the biggest trend facing corporate IT departments today: BYOD - in other words, Bring Your Own Device, as well known as BYOT - bring your own research.

Instead of facing a flat "no" from the IT department, Walji's new hires were able to download software on their own computers, allowing them access to the company's networks.

"Mobility has exploded," said Walji, Canadian country manager for Websense. "When you look at the average worker they now carry a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop computer.

The workplace

"Given this flood of mobile devices in the workplace, we find the IT guys have no choice nevertheless to allow employees to connect to the network.

"We do it across the board, first and foremost with our smartphones and recently in the last six months we extended it to tablets," said Keith Marett, Avigilon's vice-president of marketing and communications. "Everyone is enthused they can bring their own iPhone or their Android device. It's a huge bonus thoroughly."

Marett opted to get his own Apple MacBook Pro instead of settling for a company-issued PC with his company providing a subsidy for his new MacBook.

Lot in their work prefer tablets to laptops

Marett said people who travel a lot in their work prefer tablets to laptops. The recent launch of Apple's newest iPad is expected to fuel the BYOD trend furthermore.

Dave Iverson, a Vancouver-based security specialist and senior manager in advisory services for Grant Thornton LLP, a Canadian accounting, business advisory and risk-management firm, said during his company doesn't support employees bringing their own devices, it's an issue customers are increasingly asking about.

Midgley cited a recent Forrester Technology study that found 60 per cent of organizations in North America let employees access corporate networks with their own devices.

"What is in effect driving it is the rapid growth of Apple in the enterprise, it is driving BYOD," said Midgley. "With the iPad 3 coming out and shipping now in Canada, you'll see furthermore of that."

The drive for BYOD is as well coming from the C-suite

Much of the drive for BYOD is as well coming from the C-suite. Executives want to be able to have the latest innovation, they want to save money and they want to be able to recruit younger generations that expect to be able to choose their work tech devices.

However, for employees who want to bring their smartphones and their tablets to work, there's a price to be paid and in other words privacy and to some degree, control.

"Should anything happen to our devices, there is information or access to information through the devices that could compromise our company's network," he said. "All the employees at my company recognize that, we don't want anything to happen of that sort and we totally buy into the concept."

"Financial organizations are rolling out solutions like this," said Ali Afshari, director of sales for enterprise for the networking company Cisco. "And we're working with insurance companies that are using [BYOD] to enable their mobile workforce."

Cisco offers its own security and monitoring solutions for companies and organizations moving to BYOD and it walks the talk in its own workplace, adding close to 56,000 new devices to its network and together reducing the number of calls to its help desk.

Todd Carothers, senior vice-president of marketing and products at Vancouver's CounterPath - a provider of desktop and mobile voice over Internet protocol software - said his company is finding business opportunities in the trend. "We have IT directors coming to us saying 'we have all these users who have iPads and we want to leverage the fact they're bringing them in to work, we can use that as a desk phone,' " he said.