What's your advice for customers and BYOD?

Hope you enjoyed the Fourth of July holiday. Here in Maine it was rainy and foggy, but it was still glorious. You see, I was off the grid with my husband and teenagers. We all BYODs, like we always do, but they didn't work—and guess what? No complaints

So, I didn't read this BYOD story until today. It's from publication called PCAdvisor and it has some interesting statistics about people bringing their own devices to work and using them to access corporate resources.

The story does not address employees accessing corporate physical security systems specifically—but the statistics are still relevant. And it seems to me that integrators and end users need to be thinking about policy options for managing BYOD for physical security employees and physical security applications.

We did touch on this topic at TechSec in February. Steve Van Till moderated an excellent mobile apps panel, and Axis' Fredrik Nilsson talked about this question specifically.

He suggested BYOD could save money and increase efficiency for the physical security operations because workers want to use their own devices (security guards for example), but there are many ifs (what if a device is lost? How do you know for sure who is using the device?) All panelists agreed that BYOD brings up many concerns.

This writer suggests that the move toward BYOD is “unstoppable.” I don't know about that, but it's certainly got momentum, and probably a good idea to assess BYOD workplace policies even if your customers aren't asking you about them.

I liked the following stats and this question: Will employees be bringing more than one device to work?

“Gartner predicted that 90 percent of businesses will support corporate applications on mobile devices by 2014. And Cisco survey data suggests that we can expect to see 3.47 devices per person in 2015 and a whopping 6.58 devices per person in 2020. This begs the question: How many devices per person will the enterprise ultimately need to manage?”