Managing BYOD with DaaS (Desktop as a Service)

Featured article by David Graffia, VP of Sales, dinCloud

Bring your own device or “BYOD” is gaining serious momentum. However, before we go any further, it’s important to establish what BYOD is. Essentially, it’s a business policy that enables employees to bring in personally owned endpoint devices (such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc.) and allows them to securely connect to company applications and access privileged business data. It also allows employees to remotely access this information from locations outside the office (anywhere, anytime, any device). BYOD brings many benefits, but those benefits depend on your role within the organization.

How Can System Administrators Deliver BYOD?

System administrators can finally deliver a solid BYOD strategy. Once a new employee’s background check clears HR, IT admins can provision and extend new virtual workspaces in real-time and streamline the application deployment by leveraging existing active directory group policies. This means that the end-user will only have visibility to the applications he/she has rights to use. This new approach has unleashed the admin from the physical constraints of lifecycle management. They no longer have to provide a physical device and/or any of the ancillary services (e.g. imaging, configuring, affixing asset tags and tracking, etc.). They simply launch a new virtual workspace, which sends a welcome email and a temporary password that allows users to login from any device that has an internet browser and connectivity, regardless of operating system. Another inherent benefit is having a single golden image to manage. This allows for updates to occur in the datacenter and rolled out to every user overnight. Lastly, the admin can make resource changes to the workspace on CPU, RAM, and hard-drive size on the fly.

The new employee simply receives a welcome email, along with easy-to-follow instructions for login. Companies can include a short welcome video that walks the new employee through all of the necessary paperwork for insurance and corporate forms, including the acknowledgement of compliance to the conduct outlined, etc. This can be built into the image and saved on the desktop, and since most people are familiar with their own devices, ramping up is much faster. Also, employees are more likely to increase productivity outside the office when they have the means to communicate on any device.

How Can BYOD Benefit IT Executives?

From the IT executive’s (e.g. CIO, CTO, CSO) perspective, by leveraging a virtual private data center in combination with hosted workspaces, the firm can keep sensitive data from being stored on employee owned devices. This is paramount and should be developed early on in the process of planning a BYOD strategy. Another benefit is the ability to shift the capacity planning effort to the cloud service provider. In the past, firms had to get approval to buy excess capacity and grow into it. They also had to hire expensive technical resources to manage the environment. BYOD enables this group to stop the endless traditional refresh and focus on enablement.

What Can CFOs and CEOs Gain from BYOD?

Finally, from the CFO/CEO perspective, BYOD is a more efficient way to deploy and consume technology. By removing this cost from the balance sheet and having it hit an expense account on a monthly basis, there is no need to acquire or invest precious capital. It also removes the need to track and amortize the assets. It addresses the challenge with becoming locked into outdated technology.

Traditional devices tied to specific end-users cannot keep pace with the way today’s businesses are moving. Companies need a cost-efficient, easy to manage approach towards supporting and enabling the users and therefore the business.

David Graffia is VP of Sales at dinCloud, a cloud services provider that helps organizations rapidly migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud. David has over 20 years of channel experience in the areas of IT sales and consulting. For more information, visit: www.dincloud.com or follow @dinCloud on Twitter.