Here's why CYOD could be the much-awaited alternative to BYOD

One of the most interesting predictions given out by analyst firm IDC in its predictions for the year 2014 was the death of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend that has been impacting enterprises in Singapore as well as all over the world.

The analyst firm believes that enterprise mobility will go the way of Choose Your Own Device, or CYOD in the years to come. In short, CYOD is an evolution of BYOD where enterprises move from allowing their employees to bring to work any device they like, to allowing users to choose from a small pool of approved company issued devices for work, usually based on an operating system or two.

Why is this predicted to happen? Well, for one, BYOD has encountered strong resistance from corporate IT departments – especially in industries like finance which are highly sensitive – because of security risk. At the same time, there is a growing dispute around the return on investment (ROI) of BYOD.

While admittedly there are productivity benefits as an employee can still work whilst on the go, the downside is that there is a cost associated with supporting users and devices when accommodating BYOD. Each different device and operating system – and there is a huge glut in the market today, thanks to the diversification offered by the various vendors – adds on a layer of cost for managing BYOD.

While we don’t expect BYOD policies to disappear overnight, we believe that CYOD may be a suitable compromise between the employee’s needs for a mobile device to stay productive on the go, and the organisational concern of ensuring security and keeping costs affordable. This could solve mobility problems for Singaporean enterprises of all sizes.

For example, a survey by IT vendor Solarwinds’ last year showed that 70% of Singaporean SMEs are concerned about the threat mobile devices pose to network security¹ and are struggling to reconcile that concern with the benefits of mobility. Similarly, in larger organisations, these concerns are creating resistance amongst top management here², hence delaying or hindering implementation of mobility initiatives.

In the long run, this ability to compromise will make CYOD a more popular model than BYOD. Having a fixed degree of standardized operating environments and devices allows for easier management and security planning for the IT department. In essence, it increases the degree of control for the IT department and still ensures that the productivity benefits of BYOD are delivered.

This increased control would allow the IT department to assign different types of devices to different job profiles. For example, a sales team could be allotted devices like tablets for meeting clients, whilst C-suite executives could be assigned more advanced multi-mode devices which allows them to have an all-in-one machine suitable for both on-the-go and office use.

The important thing about having a limited pool of pre-approved OSes and devices is that the IT department can mobilize more business processes and applications – even the sensitive ones – safe in the knowledge that the devices are secure as they have been thoroughly tested.

We believe that CYOD will first see quick adoption amongst the larger businesses, while SMEs and start-ups may still hold on to BYOD for now. The reason is scale – businesses with thousands of staff would need to deal with hundreds of device – OS configurations whilst smaller businesses have probably less of such hassle.

For IT effectiveness, downsizing and controlling the number of configurations means that CYOD will definitely become popular amongst big companies as the ROI effect can be realised much faster.

¹Source: https://www.youngupstarts.com/2013/10/09/singapore-mobile-security-concerns-continue-to-surround-byod-solarwinds/
²Source: https://www.ca.com/sg/news/press-releases/na/2013/applications-outpacing-byod-as-top-it-mobility-priority-global-study-reveals.aspx