Privacy

But Ovum researcher Richard Absalom warns that business access to an employee's personal data brings with it many inherent privacy concerns.

“MDM features such as device activity monitoring, tracking, and remote lock & wipe necessarily involve a certain amount of access and processing of personal data and applications on an employee’s device,” Alsalom says. 'This raises concerns around individuals’ data privacy rights. Legislation differs from country to country, but one stipulation that all regions covered by Ovum’s research have in common is that individuals must give explicit and fully-informed consent for any organization to access and process their personal data.”

The way to approach the privacy issue is to be completely clear about the rules of personal-device engagement.

“The way to negotiate this challenge is to engage with the workforce, and roll out a corporate mobility policy to which employees must sign up before having an enterprise mobility solution installed and being allowed to use their own device at work,” he adds.

Today's businesses are waking up to the idea that business doesn't happen in a particular building within particular hours. Now IT departments need to make that a secure, flexible reality. Service providers are in a position to help the enterprise market build a virtual workplace that connects people and ideas across time zones, networks and job functions. BYOD is a reality. It started when Steve from marketing got his first Blackberry. Now it's up to technology to supercharge it, make it work and let Steve pay for his own Angry Birds addiction.