Published on the 13/06/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Gartner has forecast almost two in five organisations will expect their employees to provide their own work technology by 2016. BT has just launched a service and tools to support the switch…
BT has launched a suite of services and tools intended to support Australian CIOs opening the doors to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. According to Phil Zammit, head of business development for BT in Australia, the organisation is the “throes of three trials” locally, one in a fast moving consumer goods business, and the other two in global commerce businesses.
He said that while demand for BYOD had originally come from employees, there was now pretty equal support for the approach from the business. A global survey of CIOs released in May by Gartner found that 38 percent of organisations will require staff to bring their own computing devices to work by 2016. The analyst acknowledged that BYOD does introduce administrative and security burdens for the IT department, but notes that most CIOs are getting to grips with the technical challenge.
It’s the technical challenge BT aims to grapple with. It is offering a BYOD network readiness and planning service, which essentially audits enterprise infrastructure and determines whether it is BYOD ready, examining the enterprise WAN, LAN, wifi, core applications and security. It then offers consulting services to help organisations develop BYOD policy and remediate any identified gaps in the infrastructure.
BT has also bundled up a series of tools and services to help enterprises deploy BYOD. It works with Mobile Iron and Airwatch to deliver device management and mobile application management, and is also offering clients the opportunity to host their applications in BT’s cloud, providing anywhere access to BYOD users.
Its Mobile Xpress service which offers dynamic roaming for BYOD mobile users by hooking together about 5.5 million wireless hotspots internationally is also being offered to enterprise users for GBR £5 per user per month. Zammit said that network coverage continued to grow, although the main focus for local users is on major metropolitan areas of Australia.
There are still other issues to consider however. Gartner this week for example predicted that by 2019, 90 percent of organisations will have personal data on IT systems that they don’t own or control. While much of that data may be stored in the cloud, a proportion is likely to find its way onto BYODs, meaning that such devices have to be considered when drafting an enterprise privacy and security policy.
