How to cope with BYOD
- Article 30 of 33
- SC Magazine, October 2012
The cloud, mobile device management and virtualisation are riding to the rescue of organisations faced with the inevitability of 'bring your own device'. By Rob Buckley
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According to Chris Hewertson, CIO of IT services provider Colt, the company never set out to implement BYOD - it "just stumbled upon it". The company was in the middle of a major IT transformation programme, with a "perfect storm" of technology needing upgrading, including WAN, LAN, desktops, laptops and more. But rather than simply upgrading everything and looking at reducing costs, Colt chose to look at how best to help its employees.
Initially, the choice offered was simply one of when and where to work, but with the upgrade plan settling on virtual desktops running on VMware as the best way to upgrade everyone to Windows 7, employees were allowed to decide which devices they would like to use.
"By going down the virtual desktop route, we can provide that desktop on any device," says Hewertson. IT then worked with Colt's HR and legal departments to develop a BYOD policy.
At the moment, 2,000 employees have the option of using their own device, and this will have expanded to 5,000 by the end of November. "We use two-factor authentication, with CryptoCard on the employee's phone and Microsoft User Access Gateway to provide secure access if they're not on the network."
Without VMware, he says he wouldn't have been confident about BYOD. "I'm more confident that a laptop can be secured than I am that an Android mobile phone can, unless it has a nicely sandboxed secure application. [With VMware], I don't care what they put on that network."
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