Get a real BYOD solution for your corporation

When I talk to enterprise customers, I always ask about the company’s Bring Your Own Device or BYOD policy. Surprisingly, a lot of companies do not have a policy. Even though, this subject has been discussed in a lot of medias and would be one of the next big things. Not many companies have enrolled a BYOD strategy either. When I ask why, they tell me that they do not think it is a good idea.

Bring Your Own Device is when employees bring their own device to do their job. One of the reasons for that is that, people more and more want to choose which device they want to work from. Some do it because they like a specific company logo on their device.

Why is Bring Your Own Device a Good Idea

Why are we even talking about Bring Your Own Device? Employees have to pay for their IT equipment, which they can get for free from the employer. IT doesn’t seem to be too happy about it. It has to do with consumerization and the devices we use in our everyday life. Back in the days Windows was controlling most of both the company and the consumer market. Users was at that time used to Windows devices and that we all worked on laptops provided by IT. At that time, we all saw our laptop as a tool. Something that we used at work. Today, technology is a lot easier to use and is a lot cheaper to get, so we use in our everyday life. We want to transfer those experiences to the way we solve our tasks that we get on the job. The users that are coming out of colleges and universities are a lot more tech savvy and want to have a saying in want they want to use to get their job done.

Less support with a BYOD strategy

Companies that have implemented a BYOD strategy are telling the same story. And all of them are saying that the number of calls to the help desk is reduced afterwards. The reason is that users are more familiar with the device they are using, because they choose one they already know how to use. Another thing is that, if users are a part of the process of choosing their tools, they will do a bigger effort to get things to work. If something from IT doesn’t work, they call help desk from the minute it doesn’t work.

Let’s say that you are now looking at how to solve this. You want to create a Bring Your Own Device strategy. The first question that comes up is “How do I secure company data on an unsecure device?”. Well, you don’t. Keep your data safe and secure in the datacenter and deliver apps and data to the endpoint by using a terminal server solution. I know what you are thinking. You had such a solution in a company that you were working for in the 90’s. And you only used it for remote access. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.

XenApp and XenDesktop to the rescue

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop can help to offer BYOD in your organization and at the same time not compromise the security on the company network. By running the application and keeping the data inside the datacenter, I will say that your security is a lot better than using fat clients, were you have the data on the devices when you work with it.

I often hear, “I do not want unsecure devices on the company network”. Again, then don’t. Expect the network, where have your clients to be unsecure. Then you don’t have to bother about the clients and the security of those. All you need to focus on is how to secure your data center. With a XenApp and XenDesktop solution, you can give access to apps desktops, without having them interact with to underlying OS of the client.

A BYOD solution is not that far away. XenApp and XenDesktop will give the necessary tools to provide the best Bring Your Own Device solution and at the same time give the security that you need. Citrix made a video about Bring Your Own Device Strategy. You can watch right here.