Bring Your Own Device: 5 Myths and Realities

Recently, mindWireless’ own Kevin Whitehurst presented an enlightening webinar entitled “BYOD: Wise or Wasteful?” If you missed the presentation, you can find a recording of it in its entirety here.

Included in the webinar, Kevin presented five myths that mindWireless has commonly heard around the industry concerning Bring Your Own Device. You can find those five below. Converse to each myth is what we have found, from real-world experience, to be true about this relatively new and trendy style of mobility management:

MYTH: “Bring Your Own Device will save our company money.”

REALITY: With a BYOD plan, costs will most likely increase! Under this kind of program, additional security software will need to be procured and distributed to end users, as well as end-user support deployed and ready. All told, these extra costs equal (on average) a need for a budgeted increase of $10-$12 per employee enrolled in the program.

MYTH: “With BYOD, we will no longer have to worry about wireless management.”

REALITY: In mindWireless’ experience, Bring Your Own Device does not eliminate the need for wireless management, it just changes the requirements of current wireless management. With BYOD a company may even need to fortify how it manages devices to adequately support end-users and supply them with strong enough security and accountability.

MYTH: “Wireless carriers will be our primary providers of end-user support when we roll out BYOD.”

REALITY: This is true to a certain extent because carriers can indeed help with troubleshooting of personal devices. But simple troubleshooting is not the full extent of what end-users will need with the addition of the needed brand new security, corporate email and other MDM software. With a successful BYOD program an educated help desk will be needed to be of service to end-users.

MYTH: “We are ready to roll out Bring Your Own Device to our employees because we already understand the best practices needed.”

REALITY: Most companies are lacking in process, policy, and best practices to immediately deploy a non-harmful BYOD program. The hard truth is that this kind of mobile management program takes a great amount of discipline, solidly tested processes, and clear communication to not hurt your workforce in the long run.

MYTH: “If we let our employees enroll their own devices in a BYOD program we are just asking for big security problems.”

REALITY: With employees bringing their own myriad of devices to the table, the concern of “data-leakiness” does make sense at first glance. But mindWireless has found that if a company employs strong security software and transparent, intentional process it is possible to make a safe network of employee-owned devices.

Enterprise BYOD can be wise and not wasteful if executed with strategic discipline and oversight. The great irony of this style of wireless management is that it seems like a less constraining system but it actually necessitates more managerial intentionality than most. mindWireless has decades of wireless-strategy experience and is the trusted thought-leader to best determine Bring Your Own Device fit.