Ray Allen, founder of Third Way IT, an Oxford-based provider of Google apps for business, discusses the merits of bringing your own technology to work

How do you feel about using your own computer or tablet at work? For many this is becoming the reality as the trend for ‘bring your own device’ or BYOD starts to take off.

The benefits and risks of BYOD have been the subject of heated debate amongst the technology community for some time.

Some technology experts resist the idea on the grounds it is too difficult to manage and secure such a wide range of devices in a business setting. Others see it as an opportunity to boost productivity and cut costs.

A classic early example of the BYOD phenomenon was the iPhone. Just as the technology departments had invested significant sums in providing staff with an e-mail-enabled Blackberry, along came users with their iPhones asking why they could not use these instead.

The response by some at the time was to say they didn’t support iPhone.

That becomes a difficult position to take against the type of enthusiasm found amongst Mac users. It certainly does not make sense for business users to find themselves having to carry two smartphones.

Now we have the iPad, Android phones and a whole host of other ‘devices’ that users feel their workplace would benefit from.

The ‘consumerisation’ of technology has no doubt been a challenge for technology support staff but it is certainly here to stay, even if it isn ot favoured by advocates of a more traditional corporate approach.

Instead of pushing back, now many are now starting to embrace the idea. Certainly asking users to buy, support and maintain their own hardware has the potential to offload some of the work carried out by technical support.

The nagging concern is that the diversity risks making life just too complicated.

Fortunately, at the same time as the demand for BYOD has increased, so has the popularity of ‘cloud computing’, a slightly abstract term given to the use of web-based applications provided by vast data centres maintained by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

This is a game changer because it promises to make makes BYOD a viable solution. By providing applications through secure web pages, device maintenance becomes much more simplified.

All that is required is an Internet connection and a browser. The device itself becomes almost unimportant.

A good example of this is the implementation of Google Apps at Oxford Brookes University. Staff and students are now provided with a web-based e-mail, calendar and document system powered by Google instead of locally maintained servers and disks.

By providing these services as web applications the university has also removed the need to configure e-mail software on student or staff computers.

So, here we have three trends which promise to revolutionise the way we work.

The first is the popularity of consumer devices. They get thinner and faster but are in many ways becoming more standard because their job is to serve web applications.

That is driving the second trend, which is for business and other organisations to make their applications available over the web. This in turn will drive the third trend of users being able to work from any location on any device.

The transition from work-based technology presents its own challenges. One is how to migrate vast amounts of legacy data to web applications.

Another is connecting these devices to corporate technology like the printers and photocopiers, although these too are becoming web enabled.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is to make the applications, the data and the devices more secure.

The obvious danger of making web applications available to any device from any location is that you are also increasing the potential ease with which hackers can target them.

Some are against the ‘consumerisation’ of technology for different reasons.

If the likes of Google and Microsoft are providing corporate e-mail and document services to consumer devices, where does the control belong? Who owns the data? How secure and private is that data? What else can it be Pused for?

The take-up of cloud-based services by all sectors from charity and education to industry and finance suggest there has been some reassurance on these questions.

One way these concerns have been addressed has been for the cloud providers to give finely tuned administrative responsibility to the business.

That means the business can still retain control of the data, if not the hardware on which it runs.

Cloud and BYOD advocates even argue this approach is more secure.

By keeping data in the cloud rather than on a device, a stolen laptop or redundant desktop computer no longer carries the same risk of exposing data it once did.

This is particularly true as remote wipe technology (where phones can be wiped once reported as stolen) is adopted as standard.

The debate will no doubt continue, but one question remains. If you can bring your own device to work, what will you choose?

Contact: 0843 289 0462 Web: www.thirdwayit.co.uk