by Lawrence Garvin, Head Geek with SolarWinds
BYOA (Bring Your Own Application) is bound to be the next step after the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend and become the latest IT manager’s headache. So should IT departments be preparing for BYOA? What can they learn from BYOD in readiness for the likely onslaught?
For an IT department, supporting BYOA could be a very heavy task and take them away from their real focus.
IT staff are already struggling to support employees’ own devices and applications are even further from their radar.
Should they be worried about the number of apps that employees are bringing into the office every week and the potential security risks?
In addition to the question of supporting the apps, the issues of compatibility between applications will quickly present itself when an employee app needs to communicate with a company one.
It will continue to be a big challenge facing end-users, particularly around office productivity (e.g. Microsoft Outlook v.s. non Outlook calendars).
Whether an organisation decides to support BYOA will often depend on its own standards, procedures and existing applications.
Some organisations choose not to support any application brought in by staff at all. New apps installed on company devices would be automatically removed without warning.
Where free applications are available, such as Skype or DropBox, some organisations will choose to support them, as they are easier to deploy across the company and generally don’t necessitate too much support from the IT team.
Pre-empting the potential needs of the business may be another way of approaching BYOA.
By finding apps that are safe and approved by the management team, the IT staff can replace any that may be brought in by employees.
It may not yet be top of mind for IT staff, however most organisations will need to draw a line somewhere if they don’t want to let themselves become overwhelmed by the ‘BYO’ mentality.
Author biog
Lawrence Garvin is Head Geek with SolarWinds.
