Mobile
technology has facilitated several tasks that were earlier done
manually and required great human input. All such tasks are now
pursued through various smart devices that yield faster, better
outputs. Smartphones had eased processes like emailing, instant
messaging, gaming and social media. With the growth of tablets and
wearables, the expansion of artificial intelligence and information
technology is bound to augment to greater heights. Initially launched
for consumer sector, these device have had huge impacts on the
corporate environment, as more and more users brought forward the
concept of BYOD ( Bring your own devices).
Various
different devices were deployed for personal as well as professional
means. This simplified the business workflows as the employees were
not needed to be at the workplace all the time to correspond to
business credentials. They could respond to business related emails
from their homes or elsewhere. This also led the development of enterprise mobility solutions that were created to manage the organisational data and sync it with
the requisite users.
As
BYOD gained traction, various flaws were observed from time to time.
The enterprises had no control over the data being mediated, hence
data leak became a contiguous problem. A cleaner strategy was
therefore required to control the transmission of data flow from one
user to another and also to keep a vigilant scan on the users
accessing as well as manipulating the business information.
Also
the users have shifted focus from delving into office environment to
moving to free places like coffee shops for better communication of
thoughts with clients and other business related workflows. So even
though this has led to free flow of information between clients and
employees but still stricter policies are required to mitigate data
leak breaches. This brought forth the ideology of COPE ( Corporate
Owned Personally Enabled ). The devices are given by the enterprise
to the users which they can further incorporate for personal
functions also. Many convulsions initially revolved around personal
data being misused by the organisations. But various policies and
technologies for safeguarding corporate data, secure intranet, file
shares, email and PIM have been released that is having zero impact
on personal data privacy. Many containers have been created that keep
corporate data distanced from the personal data and disallow flow of
information from one application to another.
Many
business corporations are extremely against the approach of BYOD and
state it as a non profitable trend that must be disavowed at the
earliest. If the enterprises pay the user for the operator rates and
plans then the business suffer a lot financially. Rather it is a
viable approach to provide the smartphones and the plans as per
company needs to the users. Also it is illegal to wipe out
information from devices the company does not own. So in case a
device is stolen, the company can easily wipe out all its
confidential information from the device. This is again in favor of
the businesses allowing them to pose control on the data that holds
relevancy to their complete business architecture.
