Is 'Choose Your Own Device' better than BYOD?

The 'always on, always connected’ work culture is growing, as is the adoption of smartphones, tablets and notebooks facilitating that trend. Market research firm, Forrester predicts that in two years' time, 350 million workers will use smartphones, 200 million of whom will take their own devices to the workplace. It is estimated that 90 percent of organisations will have to support BYOD by 2014.

The advantages of CYOD are that IT managers can retain more control over their IT estate, as compared to the free-for-all BYOD. Despite less freedom for employees and not providing the high staff-satisfaction rates reported for BYOD, CYOD can prevent IT managers from feeling overburdened while still providing the desired functionality, mobility and flexibility.

Mr Hardeep Singh Garewal, Europe President, ITC Infotech, comments: “Windows, iOS, Blackberry RIM, Android and the growing list of other operating systems pose a real challenge for organisations to provision all necessary business applications across all these platforms. By limiting the number of options available to the staff, this complexity can be reduced significantly without losing the benefits of increased staff mobility, higher job satisfaction and improvement in efficiency and productivity.”

The growing popularity of BYOD, and now CYOD, has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for service providers. All enterprise resources were typically provided on Windows platforms, until recently. However, the BYOD and CYOD trends have thrown up the challenge of provisioning business resources and applications seamlessly across all available operating systems. As these small-form factor, user-owned devices are introduced in organisations, the challenge is to support them all seamlessly while maintaining the required governance standards. CYOD is going to make this challenge a lot easier for the IT manager than BYOD.