Consumerization of IT = BYOD
Index: Part of BYOD Strategy Series of articles
Consumerization of IT is the latest trend that has taken the IT world by storm. It refers to the growing tendency for devices, gadgets, and systems to emerge in the consumer market and then spread to business and government organizations. Consumerization is a major IT industry shift, since earlier technology-based products had their origin in business markets before spreading to consumer markets, for instance, calculators, facsimile machines, and mobile phones. When developing these products, the manufacturers had only business needs in mind. It is when common people started using it on a large scale that it became commoditized. It was two decades back with the discovery of World Wide Web that there occurred a shift in the pattern. Henceforth, all the technological innovations first made its appearance in the consumer market before becoming absorbed into the business environment. Be it iPads, iPhones, Smartphones, laptops, PDAs, tablets or Androids, these were at first designed for individual consumers before making their appearance in the workplace.
Consumerization of IT also referred to as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is defined by Wikipedia as ‘the recent trend of employees bringing personally-owned mobile devices to their place of work, and using those devices to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers, and databases.” According to Gartner, the “consumerization of IT” will be the most significant trend affecting IT during the next ten years.” Moreover, in a recent report Gartner predicted, “90% of businesses will support corporate applications on mobile devices by 2014.” This definitely proves that BYOD is here to stay.
