How to Implement a 'Street Legal' BYOD ProgramHow to Implement a 'Street Legal' BYOD Program

With BYOD, just as in driving, you’re not required to own a specific make and model of car, but it is required to be street legal.

Over the past few years, technology has ignited significant changes in the way enterprises conduct business. The exponential growth of connected devices, emergence of social media, analytics, cloud computing, and acceptance of BYOD are all resulting in a major transition in the way enterprises engage with technology. However, with the wide variety of devices and operating platforms available, many customers ask me the same question: How do we maintain a consistent experience across our enterprise?

As it stands, today's tech-savvy employee is working from a variety of devices -- smartphones, tablets and computers -- in some cases, all three -- all running a variety of operating systems. In addition, the employee chooses which applications to use, and how to use them. Combined, these nuances create variance, leading to a vast spectrum of IT support needs that may or may not be available in house.

IT Support
Without getting too nostalgic, imagine IT departments of the early nineties. At the time, we had a ton of different network elements -- routers, switches, etc. -- all hard-wired and available within reach. An SNMP server collected status information from discrete network elements, monitoring all of the working pieces so that if and when a problem occurred, the department could pinpoint exactly what went wrong.

Now imagine our wireless environment today with variance as the norm. In a BYOD program, the device itself enters a gray area between serving a personal and professional purpose. And now, without a common mechanism (such as an SNMP manager) to evaluate issues, employees often resort to becoming their own help desk -- sending tickets in the form of a search engine query. Solving an issue now relies on deductive reasoning -- assessing everything from the network to device to connectivity -- and can be far less efficient.

Building a Policy
To circumvent these challenges, companies can easily implement a set of parameters for their BYOD policy. Start by building a security framework around a limited subset of devices that employees can bring into a network, and exercise caution with older devices that have standing security flaws. Just as in driving, you're not required to own a specific make and model of car, but it is required to be street legal. Creating a workplace equivalent helps maintain a civil society within your business framework.

The power of doing so was evident recently, when one of our customers at Tata, an automotive manufacturer, decided to implement a BYOD program across offices in 56 countries. Over the course of a year, they run more than 8,000 product design reviews -- working internally with product experts and externally with automotive manufacturing teams -- increasing the complexity of meeting organization.

For each review cycle, the company includes design experts from across the network and is dependent on their availability and travel time. A more holistic business approach was needed to be more accommodating to the productivity of talented resources and reduce the time to market of products by several months. The company needed something more application driven and global, and explored telepresence products to help save travel time without losing the quality of communication that occurred during an in-person review. By leveraging the convenience and efficiency of BYOD and using tools, their teams can collaborate with manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe, and access insights from design experts in 56 different countries -- all in the same day.

To have such seamless interaction, multiple parties are each required to open up their network to communication. This level of federation is easily applied to voice communication, but can be difficult for cloud-based tools. With certain UC tools, users can securely collaborate beyond their enterprise without having to change their network, implementation or client.

Our industry is approaching the next wave of business, making it all the more important to ensure unified, flexible and forward-thinking communications offerings. Is your business prepared to manage the next phase of growth?

Anthony Bartolo is Senior Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration at Tata Communications, part of the $103.3 billion Tata group. He is responsible for the strategy, product offering and development of the Unified Communications and Collaboration services. Anthony provides more expert insight on the Tata Communications New World Blog.

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