Some of us are beginning to think with benign nostalgia of the computer techy terms of our IT youth like CPU or UPS or I/O or even that young USB. At least they were actually technical and sometimes, like CAD, the acronyms were even pronounceable. Our recent history of metaphor as term has been dismal. ‘Cloud’ is an insult to language when we get to ‘cloud infrastructure’ while ‘Big Data’ is simple but also simple-minded. BYOD is an uneasy in-between, with obvious origins in organisational caution and even reluctance —otherwise it would be ‘Choose YOD’, surely? As indeed it often is, in the sense that there will be a list of approved devices or at least operating systems that qualify for corporate permission.
An annoying misdirection is that BYOD or CYOD are in fact policies directed only at the newer generation of handheld devices, such as smart phones and more recently tablets. Restrictions on what mobile device or laptop an employee uses for work would be almost ludicrous, or indeed a PC in tablet form factor. So in reality the policy — and the restrictions — apply only to certain mobile operating systems.
We may be moving to a business world where all an employee needs is an identity and authentication system and all the computing activity is centralised. We are certainly seeing a rapidly increasing roll-out of virtual desktop systems. Now with VDI all that is now essential is the access permission and authentication and that is independent of the device. Moving towards convergence in business ICT but above the level of the device could hold enormous promise, Simon Murphy, Deloitte
Not smart policy
It all originated with smart phones and really should just be regarded as a smart phone policy. Employees have been using their own mobile phones and laptop or other PCs for years with minimal policy control required. The issues arose when computing and more importantly web capabilities were added to phones. To do that required smaller, low footprint operating systems. That new ecosphere rapidly produced iOS, fast-breeding generations of Android and later a set of Windows for phones and tablets.
The security considerations are real and getting more serious by the day, no question. At the same time we have developed a preoccupation with the devices — and specifically the handheld devices — that is overshadowing the purpose of the whole exercise. Mobile internet giving remote access to the organisation’s applications and data is enormously important and arguably the single biggest step change in ICT so far this century. The consumer side adds entertainment on demand and in fact anything that is digital and can be delivered over what is still limited bandwidth. But in business and work all that engineering has a single objective: to deliver computing anywhere, anytime with, as far as possible, the same resources as if back in HQ at a desk. ‘On any device’ could well be added. Or ‘on the screen of choice’ since very few people would tackle a spreadsheet or even word processing on a smart phone.
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