Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the latest rage, isn’t it? And it makes sense, if you think about it. Corporations are looking for ways to cut costs and enrich the computing/work experience of their employees. In fact, this is the #1 issue for CIOs today.
Along with this comes a basic change in computing style. Gone are the desktop devices which are being rapidly replaced by wireless touch screen devices using Apple IOS and Android as their operating system software. It’s easy to see why the users prefer this change, but what makes it so interesting to the business world?
Well, aside from work experience enhancement alluded to earlier, there is a real opportunity for the business world to save lots of money by allowing the users to bring their own devices. This savings comes in two forms, the reduced or eliminated cost of the device itself, but more importantly, the reduced support cost of owning the device. If the user owns the device, then they have to deal with any hardware or OS problems it may encounter. Even if the corporation gives its employees an allowance toward the cost of the device, these two savings areas save companies piles of money.
OK, so if the users love having cool devices that they can take anywhere and run their personal apps on, and businesses save piles of money with BYOD, then why isn’t the business world doing an explosive, wholesale change to this type of program? The answer is management and security have not been there… until now.
The basic problems are that it is hard to secure corporate data when it leaves the company network and gets stored on an employee device, and that there have been no tools to effectively separate the personal from the corporate applications and data on that device.
The state of the art over the past few years has been to significantly lockdown the entire device, or to lock-out access to key applications from the device. The first makes the user experience unacceptable when trying to use the device for personal apps, and the second limits the productivity of the employee in accessing corporate apps. Not good.
Well within the past few months, these problems have been answered in the form of numerous comprehensive applications that address all the problems described above, and for Citrix users, there are two stand-out products that deserve some description and comparison:
- Citrix Mobile Solutions Bundle with ShareFile
- AppSense MobileNow and DataNow
Both products include universal mobile device management, secure application packaging that separates the corporate apps and data from the personal stuff, and cloud based access to local storage. Both are very good products, so how do they compare from a features and cost perspective? That will be the subject of our next blog.
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