BYOD and the cloud or: how I learning to stop worrying and love my iPhone

The IT Consumerisation and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trends have created new challenges for IT organisations as they grapple with their loss of control over the endpoint. IT has traditionally valued control, stability and incremental change, but these are becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s world of smartphones and tablets, app stores and cloud based services. 

But while the industry is surely at an inflection point, are these challenges really new? 

While the iPhone led the current influx of consumer devices, it was the emergence of the laptop when IT first lost physical control of devices in their environment. Wi-Fi took away the control provided by the Ethernet cable long before 2G and 3G became widely deployed. And Usenet binaries, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, and AIM and even Skype were in use before FaceTime, Dropbox and Google Docs were even possible. 

In this session, we will explore the current trends around the convergence of consumer mobile technologies and cloud based services, and the implications they create for IT. But we will examine these in the context of what has come before. Through understanding the lessons we have already learned, we can then look at the current capabilities and explore how best to adapt to this changing environment. 

While new tools such as MDM (Mobile Device Management) aim to grapple with the loss of control IT currently faces, that is only one piece of the puzzle. Many of the tools, which have long formed the foundation for network security, still apply—though we may need to apply them differently. 

IT organisations have lost control of the end device and with the advent of the Cloud, they are losing control of application applications as well. But as we grapple with these issues, we must not overlook the fact that we still maintain control of the most critical element: the network itself. By focusing on what we can control, rather than worrying about what has been lost, we can still maintain the necessary levels of control and security, while supporting the changing environment our users have created for themselves.