Will The BYOD Trend Force Business Cloud Adoption?

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an irrefutable success, exploding thanks to cheaper and more powerful smartphones, the widespread adoption of tablets and the general increase in technological capability (or at least the perceived capability!) of employees. Analyst firm IDC predicts that, by 2016, smartphone shipments will reach 480 million – a whopping 65% of these will used by employees in BYOD environments.

This guest post, written by hosted exchange providers Giacom, look at how the cloud is curbing security concerns associated with the BYOD boom.

Problem: Inadvertent BYOD Adoption

Historically, BYOD has had less appeal than it does currently, and has been easier to control – if you don’t want people bringing in their own hardware, then you don’t give it access to the network, and those that do will be few and far between enough for IT departments to handle on a case by case basis (e.g. two execs want personal laptops to have access when they require them for boardroom work, but little other outside devices).

However, the rise of more portable technology (particularly smart phones and tablets) means that more and more employees are bringing their own devices into the workplace – and quite often, it’s inadvertent. Given the power wielded by modern smartphones, and the blurring line between mobiles and tablets with some of the larger devices, virtually all employees subconsciously ‘bring their own device’. More compact laptops and lightweight cloud-based devices like Google’s Chromebooks make BYOD an increasingly attractive concept – as the figures mentioned earlier show.

This is where the difficulty arises – the ‘everyone or no-one’ approach won’t work as it either blocks access top those who need it, or grants everyone access and opens a security-related can of worms. Who’s accessing what data? Which devices belong to which staff? How can we guarantee personal devices don’t compromise security?

Solution: Migration To Cloud Hosting?

The solution that’s proving popular amongst countless companies and IT departments is migration to the cloud – whether this is to replace file servers or simply just mailboxes.

There are few downsides to the cloud, and the security benefits make the unstoppable increase in BYOD far more secure to embrace – the ability to integrate existing identity management systems, or for your hosting company to develop a new one, ensures authentication and authorisation is controlled and maintained.

The ability for hosting companies to implement multiple hosting – resilience can be increased by double or triple hosting file servers or mailbox exchanges to ensure optimum up-time and almost immunity to data loss. This, when compared with the arduous task and conscious effort of manual backups, make cloud migration an ideal option as well as a solution to a problem.

The cloud gives flexibility that BYOD demands from your company’s network – access is easily controlled, security can be handled solely by the hosting company or your own IT department can play its part by helping to integrate identity management systems and virtualisation security protocols.

We’re some way off complete cloud integration across the board (although Microsoft’s newly unveiled ‘Cloud OS’ brings us incredibly close), but a BYOD/cloud hosting partnership can help to create a comfortable and secure middle ground – even just for email access on the fly.

This guest post was written by Tom McShane for Giacom, cloud hosting and hosted exchange specialists, who provide a variety of solutions for SMEs through to blue chip companies.