White Paper

BYOD & the Implications for IT:

How to Support BYOD without Putting Your Company at Risk

NEC Corporation of America

www.necam.com
BYOD & the Implications for IT White Paper

Table of Contents
Executive Summary......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

The Onslaught of BYOD: Why Now?............................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Implications for IT .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Security.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................3

Support .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 4

Business Community..........................................................................................................................................................................................................4

Performance.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................4

Desktops as a Service: Making it Easier for IT to Embrace BYOD .............................................................................................................................4

Quickly onboard BYOD employees ................................................................................................................................................................................... 4

Enhance security and make it easy to enforce .................................................................................................................................................................4

Support the corporate desktop, not the device ................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Boost workforce productivity ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Ensure positive user experience..........................................................................................................................................................................................5

Support the corporate desktop, not the device ................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

NEC Corporation of America © 2013 2

BYOD & the Implications for IT
Executive Summary
The predictions that many industry pundits have been making about
the rise of BYOD (bring your own device) are coming to fruition. The
surprise is that it is happening at a much-accelerated rate at businesses
of all sizes, around the world. While BYOD is increasingly important for
employee satisfaction, it poses significant challenges to IT in terms of
security risks, productivity loss, support issues and costs.
By adopting desktops as a service (DaaS), businesses can embrace
BYOD while ensuring security of corporate data. Employees will be able
to easily access their desktops from any—and multiple—devices, and
IT can set clear policies around usage and support that make sense for
your users and your company.
The Onslaught of BYOD: Why Now?
Signs pointing to BYOD’s growth are all around us. Gartner found
that 50 percent of employees use personal devices for work to one
degree or another1. The research firm predicts that 90 percent of
companies will support corporate applications on personal mobile
devices by 20142. In businesses that allow BYOD today, nearly a
third of the mobile devices connecting to the corporate network are
employee-owned. Most—66 percent—are laptops, but a full quarter are
smartphones and nearly 10 percent are tablets3. This suggests that, not
only are more people working from their own devices, but they are also
accessing their corporate applications and data from more than one
personal system.
There are a number of reasons why BYOD’s growth chart resembles a
hockey stick. First, the impending expiration of Windows XP support
in 2014 is driving IT organizations to evaluate alternative desktop
strategies, making them much more open to concepts like BYOD
than they would have been just a few years ago. Another factor is the
growth of smartphones, which, according to IDC, continues to outpace
PCs4. A lot of these smartphones are owned by employees who get
some form of reimbursement from their employers. These smartphones
are more than capable of accessing and manipulating corporate
applications, and employees want to use them to do just that, whether
they’re at the office, at home, or somewhere in between.
Perhaps the biggest influence on BYOD growth has been the iPad. It
took off faster than anyone had guessed. Executives started buying
iPads and pressuring IT to allow iPad access to corporate data, and
they were quickly followed by people throughout the corporate world.
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This infatuation with iPads has also driven more employees to start
using MacBooks instead of PC laptops for work, forcing IT to support
an array of personal Apple devices.
Businesses are also beginning to accept that their hard-working
employees want to do some personal tasks while they’re on the clock.
In fact, a recent ISACA Shopping on the Job Survey5 found that 96
percent of companies expected employees to use company-supplied
computers or smartphones to shop during the 2011 holiday season,
and 92 percent also expected workers to use personal devices during
office hours to shop. Companies allow this type of behavior because
they want to promote work-life balance.
It’s becoming increasingly clear: Businesses that don’t
embrace consumerization of IT and BYOD are putting
themselves at risk for low employee morale. And that’s not good for
productivity, employee retention or competitive standing.
Implications for IT
Before embarking on a large-scale BOYD initiative, you need to
understand the implications on corporate IT. BYOD raises several rather
substantial questions and challenges that should be addressed up
front, ranging from security and support to business productivity and
performance.
Security
Security tops the list of concerns that most companies have about
BYOD. A study by Timico6 found that 72 percent of companies are
worried about protecting sensitive data as employees use their own
devices for work.
When data resides on a personal device, there is tremendous risk
due to viruses and theft or loss of that device. You will need to
consider whether employees will be required to install particular anti-
virus software on their devices, and then figure out how to enforce
compliance—and whether to pay for that software. Additionally, if
employees access your corporate network from their personal devices,
then your network—and your company—are exposed to that risk. IT
must decide how to deal with allowing devices that you don’t know or
trust to plug into the corporate network. For instance, are you going to
restrict access to sites that could potentially introduce viruses, such as
YouTube or shopping sites? If you do, you may end up compromising
the goodwill that was the whole reason for allowing BYOD in the first
place.
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BYOD & the Implications for IT
Support
Do you want to manage the endpoint hardware or leave that up to each
employee? Enabling support of some personal endpoint devices (i.e.,
BlackBerries) and not others (i.e., iPhones) may lead to dissatisfaction
or even employees attempting to circumvent corporate policy. But
keep in mind that it’s difficult, time-consuming and expensive for IT
to manage such a variety of endpoint devices, particularly when they
can be easily compromised by personal use. You can also consider
providing a stipend or reimbursement for a warranty, similar to those
that some companies provide for cell phone usage.
You must also address how to handle software support and patch
management. Even if you’re following a BYOD model, appropriate
support needs to be provided for the corporate image and software.
Finally, if your IT department decides not manage the BYODs, you
have to determine what to do for employees who don’t bring their own
devices. For instance, if you support corporate-owned devices for
those other employees, you may want to use more cost-effective thin
client computers.
Business Community
How will you restore business continuity when an employee’s own
device breaks down and needs to be repaired or is lost or stolen? Will
your company provide these employees with a spare computer while
they get their devices fixed or replaced? If so, you’ll have to figure out
a process for provisioning those desktops so employees can get back
to productivity as soon as possible. If that necessitates having extra
devices on hand for this purpose, in addition to determining how many
you’ll need, you should also calculate whether the cost and time of
maintaining these devices justifies this use case.
Performance
Employees will need to be near enough to your company’s data center
that latency will not impact performance when they are accessing
corporate applications. How will you handle situations where you have
a distributed or remote workforce?
DaaS: Making it Easy for IT to
Embrace BYOD
DaaS (desktops as a service) has been adopted by many companies
that want to gain visibility into and control over the desktop
environment, while making it much more cost-efficient to manage.
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Now, with BYOD on the rise, DaaS—or cloud-hosted virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI)—is even more compelling.
With DaaS, the corporate desktop becomes an isolated application
on the employee’s personal device. This makes it possible for
businesses to adopt BYOD while ensuring data security and employee
productivity—all without burdening IT staff.
Quickly onboard BYOD employees
DaaS makes onboarding BYOD employees easy, fast and inexpensive.
With just a few mouse clicks, IT can provision corporate desktops
for employees who want to use personal devices. Because you are
leveraging the infrastructure and elasticity of the cloud, you don’t have
to plan for new capacity. Your IT admin simply goes to your service
DaaS provides a much simpler, more affordable way of onboarding
BYOD than alternatives such as traditional, on-premise VDI. On premise
requires building out your own installation for X number of desktops,
which is typically tied to employee count so that your company
doesn’t have to maintain and pay for unused capacity. Not only does
on-premise VDI require tremendous upfront capital expenditures and
ongoing maintenance for the data center equipment needed to support
VDI, but there are also cost and time-drain implications when the
company hits inflection points. As the number of BYOD desktops rises,
you need to add storage systems, additional clusters of data center
servers, SQL Server database licenses, etc.
Enhance security and make it easy to enforce
Instead of data residing on the employee’s personal device, with DaaS,
company data resides in your business’ data center. This means that,
while employees’ personal documents and applications may be at risk
if their devices are compromised, lost or stolen, your corporate data is
secure because it was never on those devices.
You also don’t have to worry about putting policies in place that,
for example, restrict online access to just the company intranet and
partner sites, and blacklist sites such as YouTube. The corporate
desktop is insulated from any viruses that attack the personal device
or applications. Therefore, your IT team can apply security-related
policies to the corporate desktop VM, or “application,” while allowing
employees to access whatever web sites, email programs, etc., they
want from their own devices. Now, you can legitimately block access
without impacting employee morale.
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BYOD & the Implications for IT White Paper

Because the corporate desktop is completely separate from the rest
of the personal device, you can easily delineate who is responsible for
what aspect of security. IT can be responsible for the corporate desktop
/VM security while the employee is responsible for maintaining overall
security on the personal device at their own expense.
DaaS provides additional peace of mind when it comes to security
because, since it was built for the internet, it is pre-configured for the
internet security paradigm. DaaS has two-factor authentication—
typically something the user knows such as a password and something
the user must obtain, such as a text code to a mobile device. It also has
an external security gateway that allows access to the corporate virtual
desktop but prevents those desktops from being directly accessed
from the internet. This is in contrast to on-premise VDI, which was
built for the corporate LAN. On-premise is risky because anyone who
plugs in while on-site can get access to your entire network, whereas
DaaS allows IT to specify who gets access and what each person can
access.
Boost workforce productivity
Decoupling the corporate desktop from the personal device also
makes it easy to maintain business continuity. The corporate desktop
“application” can be accessed from any device. If an employee’s
primary device goes down, IT does not have to be concerned about
how long it takes to provision a replacement desktop, or how much it
costs to maintain enough spare desktop computers. Employees can
easily access their desktop from another of their own devices (iPad,
smartphone, MacBook) or, if any are available, corporate-supplied
thin client or other computers. This goes a long way to minimizing any
interruption of employee productivity.
Ensure positive user experience
DaaS is ideal for companies that have a distributed workforce and
want to adopt BYOD. By leveraging a service provider’s global DaaS
distribution network—which has many more points of presence than
a single corporate data center—you eliminate potential latency issues
that could result in a less-than-optimal employee experience.

Support the corporate desktop, not the device

Because the hardware is decoupled from the software, IT can easily Conclusion
support the corporate desktop from a central location and require
BYOD is here to stay and it is only getting more prevalent. The sooner
that employees maintain support of the BYOD and any personal
IT accepts BYOD, the better it will be for employee morale, retention,
applications. And unlike on-premise VDI, where IT has to manage all
and productivity. By adopting DaaS, you can easily present the
the infrastructure required for VDI, including servers, storage, and
corporate desktop to employees on their own tablet or mobile devices
hypervisors, with DaaS you only manage the desktop images. The
without putting your company’s security or business continuity at risk,
infrastructure is maintained by your service provider in its highly secure,
and without having to devote additional time and money to complex
fully managed hosting facility.
BYOD support requirements.

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