Seven Steps to Prepare for BYOD
While the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon has clearly been embraced by a broad swath of end users, managing devices that are not owned by the company presents internal IT organizations with some major challenges.
Looking to help IT organizations address those issues, Absolute Software has released version 6.5 of its Absolute Manage software that now makes it possible to apply policies to both corporate and employee-owned devices.
Designed to support Macintosh and Windows systems along with tablets and smartphones via a single console, Tim Williams, director of product management for Absolute Software, says IT organizations do not want to be forced to acquire different management frameworks for each device they need to support.
Williams says BYOD forces long-simmering management issues inside IT organizations. Rather than focusing on devices and the fact that employees now often have two to three devices each, the IT organization needs to take a more user-centric approach to the management of IT because they are continually moving between devices to access the same core set of applications. To cope with that, Williams says IT organizations need a unified console through which they can provide that level of service.
Like it or not, most IT organizations are going to have to cope with BYOD to one degree or another. The good news is that as IT organizations gain more control over BYOD, the level of insanity that IT organizations allow is increasingly becoming of their own making.
