BYOD: Best Practices to Future-Proof Your Corporate Policy

by Michelle Maisto

BYOD increases the number of people in an organization who use mobile applications, which can lead to new efficiencies, increased productivity and cost savings. By 2015, the number of employees using mobile apps is expected to double. Still another perk: Gartner found that employees with the option of using their own devices tend to have more favorable opinions of their organizations.

Look throughout an organization for areas where mobility can substantially drive innovation, Gartner advised. Well beyond just email, this can include areas such as using mobile apps as time sheets and employee self-service HR information.

Most IT leaders aren’t fully satisfied with the BYOD policy they have, Gartner found, and only 22 percent of business leaders described their strategy as “strong.” The key is to have a well-defined set of measurable processes that can benefit from mobility, said Gartner, offering examples of enabling a field force or sales force. From there, it’s possible to look for “softer” benefits such as employee satisfaction.

Employees expect some reimbursement. Rather than paying for the phone, Gartner recommends subsidizing the service plan. The average reimbursement today is $45 per month, but that’s expected to fall below $30 in two years.

Critical to the economics of BYOD, says Gartner, is how you subsidize—whether by expense report, for example, or a device allowance that goes into an employee’s paycheck—as it can impact taxes and so hoped-for cost savings. “This task must not be completed by IT alone,” says Willis. “Involve your HR and legal departments in the policy.”

Tablets are included in more than half of BYOD policies (54 percent), though only 16 percent offer any kind of subsidy for them. Smartphones are supported by 34 percent of companies, but more than half of them are subsidized.

Media is by far the leading industry when it comes to including tablets in BYOD policies, followed by manufacturing, utilities and government.

The most common model is a hybrid-responsibility model, in which the company and the employee share responsibility for a device (and any issues). A version of this model is that the employee owns the phone and puts it on an employer carrier contract. A less common model—sometimes used for a normally unsupported platform or device—puts full responsibility on the employee.

The Apple iPhone and iPad are very popular BYOD devices “but increase the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud,” Willis wrote. Data leaks are now a more pressing issue than malware. CIOs need to respond in kind.

As BYOD becomes more common, CIOs are shifting from focusing on securing hardware to focusing on securing data. “Security has to exist in the application, in data controls and in add-on capabilities like containerization or virtualization,” Gartner advised.