What is BYOD?
Index: Part of BYOD Strategy Series of articles
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the latest trend in workplace IT deployment and one that all businesses are going to have to address whether they embrace it or not.
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.”
In short the term refers to an idea in which employees in businesses and organizations are permitted, or indeed encouraged in some cases, to make use of their own devices for their job, in place of any supplied by their employer.
In practice, the idea can manifest itself in many ways; from workers actually bringing their own devices into the office to workers using their devices outside of the local network (from home or on the move) .
The concept began life as Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) but has broadened and gathered pace with the abundance of portable non-PC devices that are now commonplace in the general public.
This is now synonym to the trend known as “Consumerization of IT”. According to Gartner,
“consumerization of IT” will be the most significant trend affecting IT during the next ten years.”
In future articles we will look at some of the benefits of BYOD to understand its growing popularity.
