Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): business impacts, mobile solutions

Mobile’s changing business. As well as the huge potential of B2B and enterprise applications, increasingly, our clients want to harness the potential of the Bring your Own Device (BYOD) trend. Many Australian businesses already allow employees to access company networks using their own laptops (49% of businesses), tablets (43%) and smartphones (53%), according to Deloitte Access Economics’ Mobile Nation report. And those figures are expected to grow. That’s great news for device manufacturers.

But the Bring Your Own Device trend presents big challenges for businesses using a traditional approach to IT:

• Productivity: Employees are now using their own independently connected devices to access apps and services that are inaccessible on company devices—usually with big productivity gains.
• Security: The use of unapproved devices for work both in and out of the workplace means businesses’ intellectual property is moving beyond corporate boundaries.
• Compatibility: We’re seeing many corporate IT departments struggle to make legacy internal systems work with the range of platforms and devices that we’re buying as consumers, and using as employees. Techcrunch outlines three types of consumer/workers, and explains how they choose their technology here.
• Change: The pace of change in the mobile space is a problem for many internal IT departments. We expect they’ll need to focus on emerging technologies, shift to agile development practices, and shorten their development cycles to cope. While SAP and others are buying cloud-centric businesses as a way to acquire talent, not all corporates have that ability.

The way your business approaches these issues has major implications for its enterprise mobility—the ability to connect staff, assets, suppliers and customers in any place, at any time. The good news is, proven solutions already exist. For example, cloud infrastructure can ensure employees’ secure access to your organisation’s data, wherever they’re located, and whatever device they’re using. Responsive web design can help your business overcome the issues associated with device and platform incompatibility. And of course, companies that need to respond swiftly to these challenges, but don’t have the skills in-house, can partner with external providers to get the talent they need. We’ve already seen organisations like Specsavers boost their enterprise mobility—and bottom lines—using these technologies. What about you?

Interested in building a mobile app locally in Melbourne? We would love to help.