Gartner: “BYOD is Driving IT Crazy”…Oh Yeah, Just Wait

CIO Magazine has an article this week about the security challenges being posed by companies embracing Bring Your Own Device policies (BYOD).

Not to sound dense, but no one’s thought about this before??? The funny thing is I’m thinking they may not have. Now that there are going to be millions of non-controlled devices out there running company data, the logical question is “How are you going to control it?” Plus there’s the matter of software standardization, how do you budget for upgrades when a person could be accessing company systems on several different devices, and what happens when the inevitable virus epidemic happens, possibly even spread through your network?

I sense a big rethink coming soon on this one, as corporate executives start asking, “Tell my why again, why you thought this would be a good thing?”

My favorite line in the story:

To help IT cope, software vendors should create what Dulaney called “beneficial viruses” that could be embedded in corporate data carried on mobile devices. These software tools would require users to have licenses in order to access files, just as digital rights management technology does with music and video files…It’s time for the SAPs and the Oracles of the world to start thinking about this.

Good luck with that.

So if Gartner is saying that BYOD is driving IT crazy now, just wait. It’ll probably get worse.

Read the whole story by clicking here.

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