Let us assume a scenario. Dr.Manohar Lal is a general surgeon. He works in a hospital wherein he has an OPD (outpatient department) to look after as well as he does surgery. He uses an i-phone and i-pad but he has a desktop at his office (OPD). In addition to this, he has a personal consultancy at his bungalow wherein he has a personal practice on every Saturday and Sunday out of his clinic located in front portion of the bungalow. He uses a desk top there, also supported by his assistant’s desktop. All the desktops are on MS Windows. Now he watches news video in an online news site in his smartphone while traveling in the car, after reaching hospital the moment he enters his OPD room instead of his desktop (all patient data) he sees OPD patient list in his i-pad. He consults his patients for two hours and finally he is ready for the operation to be conducted in operation theater (OT). The moment he enters the OT room he scrutinizes the entire history of the case (to be operated) again in his i-phone/smartphone which is accessing data from the OT server. This is the typical example of BYOD (bring your own device) concept. The similar type of phenomena gets repeated in his personal clinic also.

The Advantages of BYOD
The advantage is seamless integration of personal and official hardware to do personal as well as office work almost simultaneously. Psychologically, it is very satisfying. It makes one to use one’s personal device for office use while on move. It,therefore, improves the productivity. Applications are also seamlessly integrated to ease user’s life. The driving force behind BYOD is a new IT self- sufficiency among company employees who already own and use newer and advanced version of personal laptops, tablets and smartphones etc. in comparison to company. Apart from employee satisfaction another intention of BYOD is to save cost.

Challenges of BYOD
Is it easy? No. There are several challenges. But, the biggest challenge is about security. How confident you are to layer your proprietary valuable data on a personal device running on public network? The money organization saves in terms of front end devices, might have to spend on IT to make this arrangement ready for holistic security. Another challenge could be seamless CRM/ERP application integration to smartphone OS such as Android, IOS and Windows.

BYOD policy
We need to decide some sort of BYOD policy wherein the organization must decide how much of information should be received and by whom? There is a flip side also. Personal choice might get compromised as IT could bar or meter certain usages depending on the security policy and capping on opex. Therefore,compatibility of different devices, higher cost of security, data usage monitoring, network/device support in terms of ERP/CRM integration, opex management are the subject matter of BYOD policy.

BYOD on cloud
So, most of the experience and advantage of BYOD is felt at the front end. In a typical big CRM/ERP environment there is lot of data mining and processing using analytics which could happen on a third party servers cluster in a data center. This is BYOD on cloud. In addition to the advantages of BYOD,cloud saves a lot of capex by converting it to opex for a third party data centre. If it is done perfectly, it is a lethal combination.
BYOD on cloud makes good sense for certain kind of sales oriented organizations. FMCG, systemic retails, consumer service organizations are already using BYOD wherein it can really improve productivity through the power of mobility. In simple sense, people work while in transit improving the delivery and experience of customers. For example, sales guys prepare a specific sales presentation while moving from one customer to other apart from mailing sales report to his manager. But will this arrangement work for an investment company/bank/defense manufacturing/insurance firm wherein they deal with extremely sensitive classified information? The answer is probably not. Here we need to think about security issues.

BYOD on Cloud- more challenging
However, the moot question is the nature of the organization where BYOD and/or cloud will suite. While BYOD is a challenge,BYOD on cloud is a double challenge. Because, you are making both front end and back end vulnerable. Front end is exposed to users while back end is exposed to third party. The success of BYOD on cloud depends on case to case basis. Unfortunately, there is no right or wrong formula for it. The eco-system has to evolve to remove the confusion of security. Most importantly, technologically all the platforms must seamlessly integrate and become functional at a cost advantage proposition in terms of capex and opex. That is the key to success of BYOD on cloud adoption.