Bring Your Own Device BYOD

The 2010s decade marks an interesting stage in technology evolution: it marks the first time that, for most of us, our personal tech is better than our work tech. This tipping point is symbolised by a classic inversion: for much of the 2000s decade, an employer offering a mobile phone and laptop was viewed positively. Now, many employees would prefer to use their own smartphone and tablet PC in the workplace.

The industry calls this the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend. In principle, it seems to be a compelling proposition to companies for three reasons: firstly, employees are offering to do more work, in their own time, and at their own expense; secondly, they will find this motivating and it will be a factor in employer selection; and thirdly, the company will be spared the burden of providing the hardware to the employee. Yet despite this, many organisations are unwilling to provide this service. Why? Because the clear benefits are offset by the fear that they will lose control and that information security will suffer.

Our BYOD solutions offer the answer to this conundrum. We deliver the following as a suite of options to enable BYOD:

• We move business applications like email and CRM, along with sensitive information, into our secure managed hosting or private cloud environment
• We work with the customer to establish user profiles and access controls that could be based on existing Active Directory settings
• We set different rules for different devices, e.g. a laptop with two-factor RSA authentication has different privileges to an iPad user accessing content via browser
• We ensure that no sensitive data is allowed to be held on a remote device unless the user’s profile allows it, and if it does, we can remove it remotely

At Six Degrees Group, our focus is to link people, places and clouds. Our BYOD solutions deliver all of this and they benefit both companies and their staff. UK plc will only return to rude financial health if it finds ways to improve user productivity. That’s what we’re here to help UK companies to achieve.