So you’ve adopted a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy. Congratulations, you’re cutting-edge. But how are you going to isolate corporate and personal email? What are you going to do to control what the personal devices can access or the applications they may introduce? How will you stop employees forwarding corporate documents and storing them all over the Internet? Should employees be required to enable full disk encryption on their Android devices before bringing them in to work? And do Macs really not get viruses?

Stop. Breathe.

Bring Your Own Device may be being touted as this year’s hottest IT management headache, but fundamentally it’s nothing new. BYOD has in fact been a ‘CIO issue’ since laptops made their way into the enterprise and external cloud-based email services such as Hotmail became popular in the mid-nineties. Since that day, IT departments have been battling to ensure security is maintained while devices and corporate data are off-site. And, while much is now being said about the need to get to grips with these issues, the fact remains that most of the ‘solutions’ out there are nothing more than a short-term sticking plaster over the problem.

The very term Bring Your Own Device fails to acknowledge that a user’s desire goes further than the hardware layer. Imagine an employee proudly brings in their shiny new MacBook Pro; they’ve made this purchase because, aside from the exterior shine, they prefer OS X. If IT took a traditional, and increasingly outdated device-centric approach then they would attempt to deliver Windows applications and policies directly to that Mac, whereas a people-centric mindset would ask the question “how do we deliver the tools, apps and settings required for an employee to do their job on their device?”

The vision of user virtualisation tackles this question head-on, enabling the delivery of the apps, settings and data that a user needs to do their job, intelligently applying them on the user’s choice of device and platform from a single, centralised infrastructure. By separating the user from the desktop and managing a single virtualised ‘persona’ or ‘profile’ across all computing platforms and delivery mechanisms, IT managers can deliver a controlled, personalised experience without additional management overheads, configured and secured in accordance with business and governance rules.
Virtualising the user’s applications and settings also creates in-roads for users to bring their own applications – another up-and-coming marketing buzzword that CIOs are struggling to grasp. Essentially, users are growing tired of getting in trouble for installing Dropbox, Spotify and Skype at work; user virtualisation enables users to securely install and manage the applications they want to use, outside of the tightly-managed enterprise application portfolio and without interfering with overall security or policy, and then access them from the multiple devices they use.

Ironically, despite the proliferation of BYOD, the first thing many IT departments do, when they allow the employee to use their personal handset for work purposes, is to install a mobile device management (MDM) package to lockdown the user’s personal device. IT departments like MDM because it allows them to keep a tight leash on what is happening on the mobile device. The problem is that this leash acts more like a lasso and the device only belongs to the user in name and the constraints imposed by IT remove almost all user freedom from their device, preventing access to key applications and features, or enforcing remote wipe policies that impact personal information.

The iOS and Android ecosystems are wonderfully diverse, and the openness and flexibility are a huge factor of why they are so popular. Sure, a lot of the hardware is very good too, but applications and connectivity arguably have the greater allure. A strict MDM policy will likely mean restricted access to many applications and ultimately, the usefulness, and appeal, of the device, and associated user perception, experience and productivity levels will diminish.

Another thing that we haven’t considered yet is the user with devices from different ecosystems. The range of mobile devices is growing, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a user could have four or more devices which they may choose to work from – A Wintel desktop in the office, a corporate issued Windows XP or Windows 7 Laptop, MacBook as their BYOD laptop, a handset running Windows Phone, their iPad for portability, and maybe a Nexus 7 tablet running Android for when the kids have stolen the iPad.

Now we’re faced with the scenario of a user with many devices of their choosing, each requiring a separate policy. Device sprawl is becoming a very real worry for IT departments, and sticking short-term plasters on the problem in the form of MDM, is nothing short of the quick fix in an attempt to address the real issue.

By placing the user at the centre of policy the rest can fall into place as the device and the platform become less important. What is important is what the user needs, and what IT can provide as a contextual service based on the user, device and location to fulfil requirements in a secure, controlled and compliant manner. This is the promise of user virtualisation. Why have several, separate strategies for your multiple devices when you can have one centrally managed policy for one user and whichever devices they choose to use after that? This approach will lead to a more streamlined, consistent delivery mechanism, not to mention less complicated security controls and much improved user experience and reduced cost. Mobile devices have come of age, and are now capable of running the apps needed to make this happen, so rather than try and wrestle control of the device from the user, give the user the tools they need to get on with it, whatever device they choose to use, and however they choose to use it.
As more and more devices emerge on the market, each bringing their own differentiating features, the task for those that attempt to address BYOD on a per-device, all-or-nothing basis will simply become impossibly large. We have already seen MDM solutions adopted as a short term band-aid, only to be quickly ripped off and discarded as they fail to meet user requirements and expectations. In such cases users will reject the IT policy and attempt to circumvent corporate controls to bypass the iron fist of IT, not only to maintain personal ownership of their device but also to remain as productive and efficient as possible.
 

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