Following the rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon, it was only a matter of time before Bring Your Own Applications (BYOA) rose to the fore. After all, the whole point of having your own personal device is to load it up with any application you like.
Naturally, all this personal freedom is creating a management headache for IT. To address that specific issue, LogMeIn this week launched AppGuru, a set of application management and monitoring tools that are delivered as a service.
Via a single dashboard, John Purcell, senior director of products for LogMeIn, says AppGuru provides a framework through which IT organizations can both monitor which applications are actually being used and provide access to a catalog of applications sanctioned by the internal IT organization.
Priced starting at $29 per managed user, Purcell says AppGuru is specifically designed to allow IT organizations to dynamically apply policies and licensing controls around applications regardless of who actually owns the device.
Of course, the real challenge with BYOA is the willingness that end users are exhibiting to rapidly replace one mobile computing application with another. No sooner does the internal IT department decide to accept that a particular application should be sanctioned, and the end users that first introduced that application begin migrating to something else. In fact, mobile applications have become something of a fashion trend that is difficult for the average IT organization to keep up with.
That doesn’t mean internal IT organizations shouldn’t try. They just need to find an IT management framework that allows them to bring some security and order to the chaos in a way that, like it or not, actually allows each individual employee to do what’s best for them. The real issue, of course, is that once you get past all the fuss and bother about BYOD and BYOA, it’s really all about Bring Your Own Workflow (BYOW). And that’s not something that is ever going to be the same for any two people.