The 3 Pitfalls of BYOD

Bring Your Own Device programs are one of the most popular enterprise mobility solutions today and it’s no wonder as BYOD has an incredible sales pitch: “There will be less to manage, we will save money, and we will have the happiest employees.” While this sales-pitch may deliver for an enterprise (only after 100% successful implementation and perfectly communicated employee expectations), the road to that greener-grass is often not as advertised. This can be down-right dangerous to an organization with good intentions.

In the end, a poorly executed BYOD program can cause spiraling costs, inefficiencies, and potential data breaches. Below are the three most common BYOD fallacies that need to be addressed with sound wireless wisdom:

Cost – “In a BYOD program the employee covers the cost (not the enterprise), so if the employee had a problem they wouldn’t have bought the phone in the first place. BYOD will save our enterprise money.” It is understandable that companies gravitate toward BYOD programs solely to save money. A smartphone is a $200 expense that an enterprise pays every two years — and why spend that money if you pass it through the employee instead? In terms of hardware expense, this thinking can make a lot of sense. But such an approach tends to ignore many of the possible economic gains, especially when large companies are able to pool voice minutes and data plans, leveraging their buying power. Through this type of rate plan optimization to monthly communications cost will go down.

You can’t leverage anything when employees bring their own devices with individual voice and data plans. This cost-analysis also doesn’t even mention the additional per-device-expense of MDM security software.

Security – “Security worries are a non-issue because employes only need to be connected to corporate email, calendar, and contacts, which is easy.” The ease of connecting employees to email servers may be a non-issue for many organizations that have set up an MDM tool on the device(at a cost) but this approach does not adequately prepare for the cost of proprietary data potentially lost when a device is stolen or misplaced. At a conservatively estimated cost of $250 per lost record, a data breach can be severely impacting. In fact, research estimates the cost of a single device breach at more than $400,000 for a large enterprise and more than $100,000 for a small business, and in some exceptional cases, these costs can range into the millions of dollars.

Support – “Employees will take care of their own phones. If they bought it, they’ll know how to use it.” This approach is short-sighted. While a user may be familiar with a device, this familiarity does not make them an expert. When something goes wrong with a smartphone, or a tablet, which are incredibly complex devices, there could be a million reasons why. Expert assistance will be required for a majority of the scenarios relating to troubleshooting and even device warranty replacement. Network connectivity issues, server administration, and application troubleshooting are all places where a smart device and go bad.

BYOD can be executed with high-degrees of success, but to accomplish this there must be an extremely careful and well-thought-out implementation of the program. Straight away, BYOD may cause communication expenses to rise with the addition of security and support required especially when a company is not leveraging their buying power any longer mindWireless is the leading provider of enterprise mobility solutions to the Fortune 500 & 1000. With over 20 years of accrued knowledge of the mobile environment, mindWireless can assist your enterprise with best-practices in a complete mobile life-cycle implementation.

Contact us today for more information on how mindWireless can maximize your wireless potential in the arenas of enterprise mobility solutions, telecom cost management, and/or TEM solutions.