My computer, your rules

These battle-hardened men and women, toting their admin passwords and USB sticks, are frequently hamstrung by a lack of resources and meagre budgets; they often have to keep a business running using innovation that's ridiculously out of date. Computers are superseded by better models every month, however regularly upgrading a building's worth of research is unrealistic. The irony of this situation is that everyone in the IT department - and probably the frustrated staff they're attempting to help - will often have far more powerful computers sitting at home doing nothing. Often, the tablet computer or phone in their bag pursuant to this agreement the desk are more powerful than the machine sitting on it.

Until recently, work machines and home machines were two very separate entities. Taking a company laptop home might require umpteen forms to be signed, in which you promise faithfully that you won't accidentally destroy it. Attaching your own machine to the company's network, in the meantime, is deemed a security risk that would have the aforementioned IT department crossing themselves and muttering a prayer. However the rise of remote working, teleworking, e-lancing - whatever you want to call it - has inevitably blurred those lines. More and more of our work is being done at home on our own machines. So why can't we simply bring our own computers to work, and get rid of the clunking behemoth on the desk that's long past its prime?

There are such schemes, known as Bring Your Own Computer, or BYOC. They've been adopted by a number of companies, including names you on the spur of the moment associate with research and some you undoubtedly don't. With the naked eye glance, it's a no-brainer: the company simply offers a subsidy to its staff of a few hundred pounds and sends them shopping for a computer. We appreciate having a say in the machine we'll be using for 40 hours a week, and anyway you look at it we get to take it home and use it nevertheless we wish outside working hours. The business, in the meantime, saves on upgrading a stack of hardware; in the long term it'll save on software, too, because switching to BYOC means that all the work will happen “in the cloud”.

Instead of launching word processors, spreadsheets or database programs from your computer's hard disk, we'd securely connect through an internet browser to virtual versions of those programs that are sitting in the ether - or, more accurately, on your company's server. All your correspondence, calendars, reports and presentations would be worked on and stored remotely, so your flashy new laptop or tablet in essence becomes a dumb terminal while working hours - a viewer, an access point. At the time, as in the near future as you close that browser connection, your laptop is your own to do with what you will - full of music, games and photos of your canoeing holiday in Sweden. While the time you spend in the office, the difference to your way of working would be barely perceptible. However you might so then start to think: “I don't as a matter of fact need to be sat here. I could be anywhere.” If you don't need a work machine to work, why come into the office at all? Long term, BYOC can truly facilitate remote working and help to achieve a “work-life balance” that doesn't include an hour or more of commuting each day.

As you start to ponder BYOC, a whole list of “hang on, nevertheless what if?” scenarios spring to mind. Few of those concerns are borne by us, the proud employee carrying our shiny new device; our only real worry is the question of whether we can get online to get work done when we're away from the office. Intermittent internet access means intermittent access to the documents and applications that we use, but in the course of time this is going to be less and less of an issue, Knowles says. “There are new standards for wireless networking that will give us gigabit speeds,” he says. “And that's when virtual computing will as a matter of fact take off.”

The company

The company, on the whole, may then be fretting about a whole heap of things. Like as not a scenario where, having promised a £400-per-head subsidy for a computer, your staff heads to eBay, skimps on a low-spec machine, pockets the difference and heads out for a posh meal with their partners. To regain control over the research that's now powering the organisation, companies will inevitably have to lay down standards, give specification guidelines or even offer a selection of computers to choose from. It's not quite the free and easy choice that BYOC originally promised, however hey, the machine has to do the job.

And during businesses might fear the BYOC model of hundreds of computers with a direct internet connection to company data meandering around the world, the cloud model means that the nearly-clichéd scenario of a civil servant leaving a laptop full of sensitive material on a train is banished for ever. “One of the key drivers for adopting BYOC is to enhance security,” Graham Hann, a lawyer at Taylor Wessing, says. “Yes, it can be a problem if it's if done badly and without a properly secure model, nevertheless in theory it should contain the spread of sensitive data.”

But during your employees' new machines are supposedly dumb terminals for work purposes, they're sophisticated pieces of innovation. And during work documents shouldn't need to sit on these computers, policing a ban on saving documents to hard drives is impossible.

Despite these issues with BYOC as a concept, Hann doesn't believe the legal implications are sufficiently serious to prevent businesses from taking it up. The only remaining niggle, like as not, is the idea of a building full of employees working on machines that double as boundless sources of amusement and entertainment. If something as dull as a game of solitaire is able to distract people from their mundane day in day out tasks, imagine the temptation of folders crammed with games, videos and music; those acceptable-use policies that currently stop us from misusing the internet at work will inevitably have to be extended - though whether it'll stop people timewasting is debatable.