Changes to the visionapp blog
February 3, 2010
Last month’s blogposts on the “Bring-Your-Own-Computer” concepts marked a shift in content and direction for the visionapp North America blog. Last year, the blog primarily focused on promotions and visionapp software tools.
With the dawn of the new year, we will be focusing on discussing issues and trends in virtualization and IT infrastructure–and how that will affect the way business is done in this decade.
New visionapp blogger Michael Keen
To move us toward this goal, the blog welcomes Michael Keen, enterprise architect and strategist, who is the newest member of the visionapp North America team. Michael will blog about enterprise architecture as well as issues like IT governance and IT portfolio management.
Michael is a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) who spends a lot of time speaking in front of business groups, conference panels, and C-level executives around North America on how to take Information Technology and transform it into Business Technology. Michael is an expert in using dynamic IT concepts with virtualization and delivery infrastructures.
Michael is an experienced blogger, as well. He’s spent years writing blogs and columns for independent industry experts Brian Madden (archive) and Douglas A. Brown (Michael Keen’s Business Technology Review).
As always, feel free to provide your feedback in the comments!
BYOC: How do you make it work?
January 29, 2010
So if you’ve read the first four parts of the BYOC discussion (i.e., the last four blogposts), you know that there are some pros and cons of a company paying for an employee to buy their own computer — which belongs to the individual, not to the company.
In summary, some of the pros are:
- Lower costs (PC inventory, help desk, purchasing)
- Attracting “Echo Generation” employees
- Happier employees
- Increased workforce mobility
Some of the cons are:
- Increased legal issues
- Conflict between company discovery and individual privacy
- Non-standard hardware: either end user or IT staff must be responsible for fixing problems
Those companies who have been successful implementing BYOC programs took two important steps:
- They took on these potential “cons” in the company policy. HR, legal, and management sat down and banged out an information policy that addressed the legal, privacy, and e-discovery issues.
- Secondly, they took a look at their infrastructure, and in some cases, completely redesigned it.
A note on corporate policies for company-owned computers: A 2009 survey uncovered that most people simply don’t follow their corporate security policies. About half access personal web-based e-mail accounts; three-quarters copy information onto portable storage devices to work on at home; more than half installed their own software onto their company-owned machine–just like they would in a BYOC model. The takeaway? If IT departments think their current model is protecting company information and adequately addressing privacy issues, chances are that they’re wrong. In these cases, creating policies and changing infrastructure to support the BYOC model would go a long way toward protecting company data and address these issues today.
visionapp has assisted our clients to implement the BYOC model in various stages and variations. Those customers who redesigned their infrastructure made it possible for just about everyone to do all their work on a central network. In those cases, the end users don’t have to keep any applications or files on their laptop — they can stop in the middle of a task on their thin-client at work, drive home, and pick up where they left off on their home computer. Contractors and third-party partners can bring their own laptop to the company, and those workers have access to all the appropriate resources, but none of the company-proprietary resources.
One of the commenters on a previous blogpost mentioned running two virtual machines on the laptop — one personal, and one corporate. That approach has its use cases, and may be appropriate for some companies (and some end users). We haven’t encountered a client who has had the exact same requirements as another client — sometimes one VDI vendor is the best for a client, sometimes another one is. Sometimes clients need a mix of app virtualization, streamed apps, hypervisors, and so forth. Sometimes the end users can be most productive on web-based portals; other times, a desktop approach works best. Sometimes the BYOC model isn’t a fit, but thin clients at the work site and mobile device access on the road or at home works best.
As with any major project, this can require a significant up-front investment, but we’ve seen that the return on that investment can be recaptured quickly. We had one enterprise client invest more than $10 million up front, but they saved almost $50 million in IT operations costs over the first 36 months–well beyond BYOC savings. They’ve been able to save on server management costs. Some clients use a unified desktop that has increased their user productivity 20%.
One other point: Some of our clients believe they should have made these infrastructure investments years ago. When our initial assessment determined that their employees were treating their company-owned laptop as a personal laptop anyway–like the aforementioned survey found–visionapp worked with the company to update their information access and security policies, and create an infrastructure that supported those policies.
Obviously, I don’t have the numbers (or approaches) for organizations who aren’t our clients. And obviously, the BYOC approach — as Citrix’s Tedd Fox says — isn’t for everyone. But more and more organizations are considering BYOC, and realizing that reworking their infrastructure can provide a lot more than BYOC savings.
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