BYOC: Should employees buy their own computers?

[Phantasee]

13 January 2011
BYOC: Should employees buy their own computers?
By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News

You are at work. Your computer is five years old, runs Windows XP. Your company phone has a tiny screen and doesn't know what the internet is.

Idling at home are a snazzy super-fast laptop, and your own smartphone is barred from accessing work e-mail.

There's a reason for that: IT provisioning is an expensive business.

Companies can struggle to keep up with the constant rate of technological change. The devices employees have at home and in their pockets are often far more powerful than those provided for them.

So what if you let your staff use their own equipment?

Global law firm SNR Denton is in the process of rolling out a remote access system. Information services director Neil Pamment says their old system was too limited.

"If you wanted to use more than e-mail you needed a company laptop," he says. "We wanted to have applications held in the office but accessed remotely without the need for one."

The firm has retained a few pool laptops that are available to staff, but they are encouraged to buy their own devices and access their desktop remotely from home or on the move.

"The old environment was very support heavy, so we can use our support staff to do other critical work without getting sidetracked."

Work-life balance was another driving factor, according to Mr Pamment.

"You can use it from anywhere and people like working at home in an easy fashion. One quote [from a lawyer] was 'super super impressed'."

Bill, please

In 2010, food and drinks giant Kraft announced it would provide a subsidy to staff in the US to allow them choose their own computers.

The conglomerate is just the latest business to adopt the policy. Microsoft and Intel both run "bring your own computer" (BYOC) schemes where the hardware is subsidised - as does Citrix, the company that provides SNR Denton's virtualisation capability.

The scheme launched in 2008. Citrix gives staff a stipend and they then buy the computer of their choice. Mick Hollison, vice-president of marketing, says not only has it cut costs, but staff like the control.

"Employees love having the freedom to choose whatever they like," he says.

"The reality is that there are a number of consumer devices that provide services that you just don't see in a corporate laptop, and employees just enjoy their computing experience more."

Staff taking advantage of the scheme must buy a three-year service contract.

"From that point forth the device is their responsibility, and not that of the company," adds Mr Hollison. "We don't asset manage it in any way.

"If they want to fill it full of photos and videos of their children, they're free to do so, because the connection back to Citrix is securely in the data centre.

"The device is effectively just a viewer."

Critics of the strategy have flagged security as a concern, pointing out that people may do things with their own equipment they wouldn't consider with a company laptop. Mr Hollins says they have not found this.

"One of the prerequisites is to have a standard McAfee anti-virus installed on the device. Outside of that the connectivity back to Citrix is done by our own technology which is inherently secure."

Alan McBride, IT infrastructure project manager at SNR Denton, points out that data is only held in the data centre.

"The design that we implemented was that no data or access to the device was enabled locally, so you can plug in your USB but it would not be registered when you have a Citrix connection. "

'Bring your own tablet'

Chris Knowles is head of solutions at IT services provider Dimension Data, who also provide virtualisation and BYOC services. He says cost and employee morale are just some of the benefits of a BYOC strategy.

"I can see it becoming almost the norm for mobile workers, provided that the IT department can understand how to deal with the application provision and the security of it.

"Especially as we see the uptake of virtual desktop technology, given that the data never leaves your data centre - you can't store it or save it remotely."

Mr Knowles says that companies thinking of adopting the strategy need to consider the applications that employees need on their desktops.

"You need to provide clear guidelines on what that end equipment should be capable of doing, around the security of that device and acceptable usage and protection policies for corporate data."

He says it may not be laptops that drive uptake.

"I think it's tablets that will probably drive the phase the heaviest, because the simplicity of them, the power they have, the overall portability and sheer ease of use.

Citrix's Mick Hollison agrees. "It's interesting what's taken place with the tablet market. In my estimation a lot of BYOC is going to become more like BYOT (Bring Your Own Tablet)."

Get it legaled

Before sacking half the IT department, there are other considerations for businesses considering a BYOC policy.

Graham Hann is technology partner at European IT law firm Taylor Wessing. He says companies need to remember friends and family often have access to personal laptops.

"This opens up security risks, the data on there is potentially going to be viewed by more people."

Mr Hann stresses the need for businesses to review security policies.

"A lot of it's commonsense - use of passwords, management of passwords, updating passwords, or two stage authentication.

"I think regulated businesses, such as banks, are going to take a lot longer to adopt these kind of structures."

Depending on the jurisdiction there are other issues - it could be considered an employee benefit, leading to tax implications.

In the EU consideration needs to be given to who qualifies for the scheme - excluding part-time workers could disproportionately affect women, leaving business open to claims of discrimination.

Wishful thinking?

Not everyone is convinced that dividing your IT budget between your staff is a wise move. BNet columnist Erik Sherman says the driving factor behind the strategy may have more to do with wishful thinking than reality.

"How much control does the company have? Maybe not very much. There's the risk that the employee has downloaded something, a virus at home, and then look, it's on the network.

"Why do you assume the employees are going to spend the money on the service contract just because you told them to?"

He is also sceptical about how useful those service contracts are likely to be.

"Have you ever got anything repaired through a chain store? I have - it took like four weeks.

"Please don't tell me it's going to go any faster because I bought the computer for work?"

Despite this, whether the driving factor is cost-cutting, employee satisfaction or flexibility, companies like Dimension Data and Citrix have found that over the last year there's been a marked increase in interest in BYOC.

Regarding their in-house programme, Citrix's Mick Hollinson says nearly 20% of staff have taken advantage of the scheme.

"It's shown on average savings of 15-20% versus a traditional desktop deployment.

"I have a new employee of my own, a new director of marketing within the company. He came onboard, and within the first week he joined the BYOC programme.

"He went out and purchased himself a brand new Mac. He was very happy to get the device, and the company was very happy to not have it on their books."

[Uraniun235]

"He went out and purchased himself a brand new Mac. He was very happy to get the device, and the company was very happy to not have it on their books."

Really? Not on the books? So is there ever additional money granted for equipment replacement?

I can't help but wonder if some of these people are idiot managers who have somehow convinced themselves that they've somehow converted an ongoing expense into a series of one-time payments.

[General Zod]

If I don't get to expense it the company can kindly fuck off. I'm not dropping several hundred dollars on equipment that the company should be purchasing itself.

[Phantasee]

The idea is that you would buy a computer anyway, the company subsidizes the purchase because you're going to use it for work as well.

[Falarica]

For Citrix this is a very sensible thing to do as they create the software to virtualise Desktops and Servers.

This means that all you have to do is download the software (onto a pc) and start a virtual desktop (which the company tailors to your needs) and start word processing or whatever away. Any computer can run this software, even Macs and Linux machines.

That being said I can see less well led IT departments seeing this as a way to cut costs by letting everyone buy whatever they want. Everything from wimpy netbooks to desktop replacements to macbooks will suddenly need to be supported.

IF you have a sensible system using virtual machines this is not as bad problem but if everything is just installed onto the machines you would need multiple versions of MS Office (one for PCs and one for Macs). If you have any internal programs they would need to be ported if they had not been so already.

The security implications are very disturbing. Having only McAfee is not a credible security measure. You need full encryption of the laptop's hard disk and strong passwords. Needless to say most people do not do these things on their home machines let alone their work machines.

[Marcus Aurelius]

For Citrix this is a very sensible thing to do as they create the software to virtualise Desktops and Servers.

This means that all you have to do is download the software (onto a pc) and start a virtual desktop (which the company tailors to your needs) and start word processing or whatever away. Any computer can run this software, even Macs and Linux machines.

Yep. Remote virtual desktops is the way to do it. If download of files to local computer is prevented, it is reasonably secure. Ironically, this essentially means a return to centralized system where the PC (or tablet) is used almost like a dumb terminal. Call it a thin client or whatever. This has been predicted to happen for some time, but the infrastructure has not been ready for it to become common. Perhaps it now is, with broadband, WiFi, 3G and 4G cellular networks becoming commonplace everywhere. Most ideas in IT are actually not new, but technological limitations have previously prevented effective implementations.

[General Zod]

The idea is that you would buy a computer anyway, the company subsidizes the purchase because you're going to use it for work as well.

Unless I don't have the money for a computer to begin with, or they need specialized software that costs upwards of thousands of dollars, in which case we run into problems.

[Marcus Aurelius]

The idea is that you would buy a computer anyway, the company subsidizes the purchase because you're going to use it for work as well.

Unless I don't have the money for a computer to begin with, or they need specialized software that costs upwards of thousands of dollars, in which case we run into problems.

In a virtual desktop solution all the software runs on the servers. Obviously it might not be suitable for software that requires considerable processing power, because there might be problems with the servers coping with the loads, but such power hungry software is no longer very common in most jobs.

[General Zod]

In a virtual desktop solution all the software runs on the servers. Obviously it might not be suitable for software that requires considerable processing power, because there might be problems with the servers coping with the loads, but such power hungry software is no longer very common in most jobs.

For anyone in an engineering or design field, they're plentiful. Good luck getting any kind of Autodesk product to run properly in a virtual environment.

[Marcus Aurelius]

For anyone in an engineering or design field, they're plentiful. Good luck getting any kind of Autodesk product to run properly in a virtual environment.

Oh, I know that, but nevertheless those kind of jobs are a relatively small minority of all corporate personal computer users.

[Zaune]

Yep. Remote virtual desktops is the way to do it. If download of files to local computer is prevented, it is reasonably secure. Ironically, this essentially means a return to centralized system where the PC (or tablet) is used almost like a dumb terminal.

A concept that was consigned to the dustbin of history several years ago, for the very good reason that it created a single point of failure for every IT function in the building. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it seems to me that if you're doing anything server-side that doesn't absolutely have to be, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
And just for the record, BYOC will inevitably mean everyone buying a laptop. This is a great way to colossally increase the in-house tech support team's workload and staff turnover, even if you go thin-client to the max and make everyone work in VMWare.

[Jawawithagun]

Yep. Remote virtual desktops is the way to do it. If download of files to local computer is prevented, it is reasonably secure. Ironically, this essentially means a return to centralized system where the PC (or tablet) is used almost like a dumb terminal.

A concept that was consigned to the dustbin of history several years ago, for the very good reason that it created a single point of failure for every IT function in the building. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it seems to me that if you're doing anything server-side that doesn't absolutely have to be, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

And it has been dug out again and is being heavily promoted everywhere. They're calling it Cloud Computing now.

And just for the record, BYOC will inevitably mean everyone buying a laptop. This is a great way to colossally increase the in-house tech support team's workload and staff turnover, even if you go thin-client to the max and make everyone work in VMWare.

It also means management can tell you to work from home, saving the company some cash around the office. Plus, of course you will pay for your own broadband connection you need to access the company servers.

[Marcus Aurelius]

And it has been dug out again and is being heavily promoted everywhere. They're calling it Cloud Computing now.

It also means management can tell you to work from home, saving the company some cash around the office. Plus, of course you will pay for your own broadband connection you need to access the company servers.

Yes. Cloud Computing is part of the same equation, even if it isn't exactly the same what Citrix is doing. 'Single point of failure' sounds like a bad thing, but with modern high availability clusters that failure is unlikely to happen. Of course network failure is still a possibility for people connecting from outside of the LAN, but usually such failures are not long enough to be much of a problem. Like I wrote, the history IT is full of old ideas left unused or abandoned for various reasons that later resurfaced and became successes once some enabling key technologies were developed or simply some threshold for practicability was crossed.

As for the working from home, I think the broadband connection payment scheme would be dependent on the company. I would expect many companies to subsidize your home broadband if they expect you to work from home on a regular basis. It's still much cheaper for them than to maintain large office spaces. Another possibility would be a wireless connection used exclusively for work related networking. A bit iffy perhaps with 3.5G, but much more comfortable with 3.75G, let alone 4G wireless technologies.

[Jawawithagun]

As for the working from home, I think the broadband connection payment scheme would be dependent on the company. I would expect many companies to subsidize your home broadband if they expect you to work from home on a regular basis. It's still much cheaper for them than to maintain large office spaces. Another possibility would be a wireless connection used exclusively for work related networking. A bit iffy perhaps with 3.5G, but much more comfortable with 3.75G, let alone 4G wireless technologies.

The companies I worked for, what they would be willing to subsidise would be something with an allowance capping at somewhere around the 18th each month with normal business use only or with an ISP about as reliable as a Lada.

As for 3.5G/4G - it's a possibility but the spotty infrastructure, even for basic 3G, as soon as you get out of the city centre makes it unlikely in the near future.

[General Zod]

For anyone in an engineering or design field, they're plentiful. Good luck getting any kind of Autodesk product to run properly in a virtual environment.

Oh, I know that, but nevertheless those kind of jobs are a relatively small minority of all corporate personal computer users.

Frankly I don't even know if I'd want to try running any kind of Office program with large files in it via virtualization. I've had my desktop at work crash a number of times because the machine was struggling to deal with all the formulas in a 100mb excel file or importing data from a very large database.

[Mr Bean]

Another massive major problem with BYOC

How exactly are you going to monitor your own employee's if it's BYOC? It's a lot harder to justify monitoring programs and reading their email if it's a private computer. Same thing with workplace checks, want to make sure Bob's not surfing porn at work? Much harder to prove when bob is using an anonymity surfer via your WIFI.

Now add in another major issue

Security, specifically your not going to have any. Your IT staff is not going to maintain 50 flash profiles on hand so they can re-flash a virus laden computer and never mind data loss because users will be bringing computers home as it's their own private property. Hard to go to a company and say "buy your own computer and keep it here at work, and trust us we will give it back to you if we fire you".

No BYOC makes no kind of sense from a support of business prospective.

[General Zod]

Another massive major problem with BYOC

How exactly are you going to monitor your own employee's if it's BYOC? It's a lot harder to justify monitoring programs and reading their email if it's a private computer. Same thing with workplace checks, want to make sure Bob's not surfing porn at work? Much harder to prove when bob is using an anonymity surfer via your WIFI.

To add to this point. Productivity is going to take a hit for anything even remotely complicated that needs clarification. It's a lot easier to walk down the hall to someone's cube and ask a question than to send off an email and hope they're at their desk to read it.

[weemadando]

This will never happen where I currently work.

Can you imagine the stink of having social security employees having access to the databases from their personal computers?

[Marcus Aurelius]

Frankly I don't even know if I'd want to try running any kind of Office program with large files in it via virtualization. I've had my desktop at work crash a number of times because the machine was struggling to deal with all the formulas in a 100mb excel file or importing data from a very large database.

This is a hardware problem (unless there a software bug, but that's beyond this discussion). I don't know what kind of desktop you have at work, but having a server powerful enough to handle a largish number of such operations simultaneously is not that difficult (database servers already handle massive amounts of data), and in any case not all users are going to do them at the same time unless you're really unlucky.

[Ryan Thunder]

[...cloud computing...]

It also means management can tell you to work from home, saving the company some cash around the office. Plus, of course you will pay for your own broadband connection you need to access the company servers.

They'll just have to pay you more, then.

It's ecologically effective, anyway since you aren't commuting to the office every day.

[Marcus Aurelius]

This will never happen where I currently work.

Can you imagine the stink of having social security employees having access to the databases from their personal computers?

Well, it depends entirely on whether there is an efficient way to copy the data from the database to your computer. Inefficient ways of course always exist; you can take a picture of the screen with your (cell phone) camera and whatnot. Not too many workplaces apart from some government agencies handling secret data or R&D centers of competitive businesses actually ban you from bringing your own phone or even a camera to work, so ways to smuggle out pieces of information already exist in most cases. What realistically can be be expected is that there should be no way to smuggle out large amounts of data similar to the recent USB memory scandals in the UK.

[Hamstray]

Single point of failure' sounds like a bad thing, but with modern high availability clusters that failure is unlikely to happen. Of course network failure is still a possibility for people connecting from outside of the LAN, but usually such failures are not long enough to be much of a problem. Like I wrote, the history IT is full of old ideas left unused or abandoned for various reasons that later resurfaced and became successes once some enabling key technologies were developed or simply some threshold for practicability was crossed.

The only technology I can think of that might revive the mainframe + dumb terminals model would be quantum computing, until they start to cram that technology into consumer PCs.

[Marcus Aurelius]

The only technology I can think of that might revive the mainframe + dumb terminals model would be quantum computing, until they start to cram that technology into consumer PCs.

Thats simply ridiculous. The processing and memory requirements of common office applications for a large number of users are quite manageable with current server hardware. And if you read the OP carefully, Citrix is already using it with their own employees, not surprisingly since they have been developing the technology for years. Please note that I'm not talking about engineering workstations here; we already went through that issue in this thread.

[Hamstray]

Thats simply ridiculous. The processing and memory requirements of common office applications for a large number of users are quite manageable with current server hardware. And if you read the OP carefully, Citrix is already using it with their own employees, not surprisingly since they have been developing the technology for years. Please note that I'm not talking about engineering workstations here; we already went through that issue in this thread.

My bad. Apparently jobs where the use of computers is limited to office software but still require people to spend the majority of their time in front of a computer are not as rare as I thought.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Thats simply ridiculous. The processing and memory requirements of common office applications for a large number of users are quite manageable with current server hardware. And if you read the OP carefully, Citrix is already using it with their own employees, not surprisingly since they have been developing the technology for years. Please note that I'm not talking about engineering workstations here; we already went through that issue in this thread.

My bad. Apparently jobs where the use of computers is limited to office software but still require people to spend the majority of their time in front of a computer are not as rare as I thought.

I don't know if your reply is sarcasm or not, but even if isn't, it's still misguided. Office applications are just an example. There is plenty of other software which does not have significantly higher computational or memory requirements, either.