How a robust BYOD policy can help cut IT costs & drive business growth

Accops
February 18, 2021
8:52 am

BYOD has evolved from being a ‘trend’ to a ‘concept’ and now to a ‘business strategy’, as it has the potential to bring substantial business benefits to enterprises. Although BYOD has been in practice in several organizations with some limited number of professionals using their personal devices to work, it has gained significant traction in the current Covid-induced regime of remote work. Today, according to Gartner, about two-third of remote users are using personal desktops and laptops for office work. Here is a look at some of the business benefits that a well implemented BYOD policy offers:

Business continuity

With BYOD, enterprises can seamlessly enable their employees to continue to be productive even during pandemic situations, regional disasters, or other such unfortunate circumstance and ensure that business does not come to a complete standstill. Thus, BYOD can become an integral part of any organization’s Business Continuity Plan.

IT cost savings

BYOD can result in cost-savings right from initial device purchase to IT helpdesk support. Employers need not spend loads of money in buying new PCs and regularly replacing them to keep up with the fast-evolving end user computing landscape. Also, routine services and other time-consuming helpdesk activities need not be carried out by enterprises.

Reduced burden on IT teams

As BYOD essentially transfers the onus of maintaining the PC hardware to employees, IT teams’ burdens are significantly eased and they shall focus more on access management & application management, and efficiently carry out their jobs.

Operational agility and flexibility

BYOD makes activities like mergers and acquisitions, vendor collaboration, new employee hiring significantly easier as new users can be onboarded overnight and allowed to work from wherever they are. Thus, organizations become considerably more agile and flexible.

Improved productivity

Increase in productivity is an important BYOD business case. With BYOD, employees can have better and greater access to corporate information and communication systems allowing them to be productive from wherever they are.

Employee satisfaction

BYOD is increasingly becoming an important tool for attracting and retaining talent. BYOD is often the very step towards empowering employees to work from anywhere. Empowering employees to seamlessly move from one place to another, work from anywhere using any device they prefer, results in better job satisfaction.

Although BYOD offers several benefits as stated above, it does pose serious security-related challenges. If businesses can ensure that data security related risks are mitigated before implementing BYOD, then BYOD can be used a tool to achieve sustainable business growth.