The majority of the focus around BYOD (bring your own device) has correctly been on the most immediate impacts you're likely to see--policy challenges, user issues, cost control--and these are significant. We touched on some of them in our BYOD session at Enterprise Connect. There are issues that you may not have considered, which seem obvious once they're brought up, such as:
* When a mobile device becomes the subject of legal proceedings. On our panel, Robert Harris described the case of a police officer whose text messages to his mistress became part of a legal case, the issue being what's discoverable on that device, and how might this pose a danger to the employer? And how might the answer differ if the device is owned by the employer, versus if the device is owned by the user?
* Employment law. We got an excellent question from the audience about whether non-salary employees should be allowed to do BYOD--if these workers access a device they use for work when they're off the clock, what do the laws governing overtime and part-time hours have to say about the situation? Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research said he'd already encountered such a situation in his consulting practice, and he stressed the importance of involving your human resources team in crafting your BYOD policy, to deal with issues like this.
These are the obvious issues, the ones you expect you'll run into any time you start deploying a new technology, especially one that's user-driven. But I'm starting to see companies tackle more of the pure technology challenges that are starting to arise around BYOD, specifically the challenges of supporting Apple iOS devices within the enterprise.
At Enterprise Connect, I had the opportunity to meet Mike Valletutti, CEO of Applied Global Technologies. Mike spoke on a session on Mobile Video, and when we met at AGT's booth, he described the company's Mobile Pathway Protocol.
As AGT describes it:
Mobile Pathway leverages already open and secure standard web ports to enable connectivity between mobile devices and HD video systems. With just the download of an app or the launch of a web browser--smartphones, tablets and laptops are enabled with Mobile Pathway. Users experience an easy connection without requiring special firewall devices, system registration or configuration from IT departments.
Basically, Mobile Pathway is a firewall traversal protocol for video systems, and the use case Mike Valletutti described to me is one that's likely to become increasingly common: A visitor, say a consultant, is on site at a partner or customer, and wants to do an ad hoc video conference via their iPad, from a conference room. The user may be able to access the Guest WLAN, but needs to be able to traverse the visited company's firewall. Mobile Pathway opens up well-known ports, generally Port 80 and Port 443, which are not generally used for video systems.
The vast majority of iPad traffic goes over WLAN rather than 4G cellular, and this is likely to continue to be the case, given the ever-increasing costs of public cellular data plans. So while running the ad hoc iPad conference over the cellular connection is possible, doing so on a regular basis is likely to be prohibitively expensive. The diagram below shows how AGT sees this working:
Note that this AGT protocol isn't inherently an Apple-only scenario, but in practice iPads continue to dominate. If Android tablets gain share the way Android smart phones have, it would apply just as well to them.
However, when Mike explained the AGT Mobile Pathway use case, it reminded me of a recent announcement that was Apple technology-specific, the Bonjour gateway recently released by Aerohive. That product allows for iOS-based functions to cross network subnets, something that could prove more of a practical challenge as iPads and iPhones become default end user devices for many users.
This is a similar instance where consumerization of IT/BYOD is creating situations within enterprise locations that foster demand for some specific solutions that innovative companies can respond to. Both the AGT firewall traversal solution and the Bonjour gateway are point solutions, aimed at solving specific challenges in specific use cases--which means that eventually they may become checkoff items in larger software packages or releases. But for now, tackling these kinds of issues discretely could prove very useful to enterprises.
This is a similar instance where consumerization of IT/BYOD is creating situations within enterprise locations that foster demand for some specific solutions that innovative companies can respond to. Both the AGT firewall traversal solution and the Bonjour gateway are point solutions, aimed at solving specific challenges in specific use cases--which means that eventually they may become checkoff items in larger software packages or releases. But for now, tackling these kinds of issues discretely could prove very useful to enterprises.
