The concept of BYOD (bring your own device), which gives employees the flexibility of using their personal devices at work, is slowly gaining ground in India, driven by the youth.

According to the Cisco Connected World Technology Report, which surveyed more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, including India, found that 81 per cent of the people queried wanted to get money from the company to buy the device of their choice or bring their own.

Mr Arun Gupta, Group Chief Information Officer, Shoppers Stop, would probably agree with the report. “We are encouraging BYOD and people are thrilled,” he said.

Mr Gupta said that thanks to BYOD, the company has not spent much on tablets and most of the tablets connecting to the corporate network belong to employees themselves.

Cisco tablet

And Cisco appears to be a company that eats its own dog food. Though the company has a tablet of its own – the Android-powered 7-inch Cius, which is exclusively sold to enterprises – it is going the BYOD route because of a growing preference among youngsters for their own devices.

While BYOD may reduce Cius' chances – employers may hesitate to spend money on a Cius for an employee who already owns an iPad or an Android tablet – it does boost the company's chances in another direction – video conferencing.

As Mr Brian Dal Bello, Director Product Marketing, Cisco, said, “Facial expression accounts for 70 per cent of visual communication and has nothing to do with the spoken word.”

Traditional TelePresence is no longer the only option for executives on the move, and Cisco wants to cash in on the BYOD trend and enable video conferencing on the go.

One reason why Cisco is doing this is because corporates are cutting spending due to the slowdown. Another reason is because of the young generation, which prefers to BYOD.

“Over the next five to eight years, around 40 per cent of employees will be retiring, and they will be replaced by the current set of graduates for whom things like BYOD and Facebook are extremely important,” said Mr Peter Bocquet, Regional Director Collaboration and Virtualisation Technologies Asia Pacific/Japan, Cisco. And youngsters are not the only ones to adopt BYOD.

In fact, on June 12, 2011, Mr Basab Pradhan, Senior Vice-President, Head of Global Sales, Marketing and Alliances and Member, Executive Council, Infosys, posted a blog entry titled ‘The Two State World View and BYOC' on his blog 6ampacific.com in which he pointed out that he would end up missing his personal tech freedom because he was returning to Infosys.

“Current IT policies are based upon a ‘two state' view of the world. It sees the ‘employee at work using company computing infrastructure' and ‘employee on her own time, on her own device' as two states, separated by time and space. This is increasingly untenable,” he wrote.

Security issue

One major issue that companies have in this field is that of security and companies like VMware have come up with a solution for this.

Explained Mr T. Srinivasan, Managing Director of VMware India & SAARC, “The company can use a VMware solution to download a virtual phone onto an employee's Android mobile.”

This virtual phone is controlled by the corporate policies of the company and when the employee leaves, this can be deleted, protecting sensitive corporate information.

Another option is to do what Mr Gupta is doing – don't store anything on the device.

“Corporate data are not stored on the device. The users are just seeing the screen and not storing anything locally. Everything is accessed through the browser.”

> balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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