Introduction to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Just a few years ago PCs used in the office were superior to those people had at home. This situation has changed now – while most organizations still use bulky PCs or laptops with a limited set of business software, users at home have access to fast laptops of the brand they like, tablets that allow them to run thousands of highly attractive applications and they have fast broadband internet connections at home that are often faster than the network in the office.

To attract new employers and because people will take their personal device to the office anyway, most organizations are now confronted with a new paradigm, called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).
BYOD allows people to bring personally owned – typically mobile – devices to the office, using them to access the organization’s  applications and data,  as well as their personal applications and data.

The BYOD concept creates conflicting interests. Systems managers want to fully control the end user device, while the owners of the devices want full freedom. And since the user paid for the device (they brought their own device), it will not be acceptable that systems managers can erase the device at will (including all family photos or purchased music) or that this data is even visible to the systems managers.

Virtualization techniques can be used to create separate environments on these devices. This is still a niche market, but there are solutions that implement a hypervisor on the device that runs two virtual machines:

  • One virtual machine with has access to the organization’s data and applications and is fully managed by the organization’s systems managers. This virtual machine is managed using Mobile device management (MDM) that can be used to monitor, maintain and secure devices. When needed, the machine can be remotely wiped to remove all sensitive data.
  • One virtual machine that is owned and managed by the end user. This machine runs whatever applications the user wants (browsers, social network clients, games, music and video players, etc.).

Both virtual machines use the same underlying hardware like network connections, screen, GPS, compass, sound system, etc.  Since both virtual machines are run on top of a hypervisor, no sensitive data will be available from the user’s managed virtual machine.


This entry was posted on Thursday 29 November 2012

Earlier articles

Quantum computing

Security at cloud providers not getting better because of government regulation

The cloud is as insecure as its configuration

Infrastructure as code

DevOps for infrastructure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Hyper) Converged Infrastructure

Object storage

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

What's the point of using Docker containers?

Identity and Access Management

Using user profiles to determine infrastructure load

Public wireless networks

Supercomputer architecture

Desktop virtualization

Stakeholder management

x86 platform architecture

Midrange systems architecture

Mainframe Architecture

Software Defined Data Center - SDDC

The Virtualization Model

What are concurrent users?

Performance and availability monitoring in levels

UX/UI has no business rules

Technical debt: a time related issue

Solution shaping workshops

Architecture life cycle

Project managers and architects

Using ArchiMate for describing infrastructures

Kruchten’s 4+1 views for solution architecture

The SEI stack of solution architecture frameworks

TOGAF and infrastructure architecture

The Zachman framework

An introduction to architecture frameworks

How to handle a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack

Architecture Principles

Views and viewpoints explained

Stakeholders and their concerns

Skills of a solution architect architect

Solution architects versus enterprise architects

Definition of IT Architecture

What is Big Data?

How to make your IT "Greener"

What is Cloud computing and IaaS?

Purchasing of IT infrastructure technologies and services

IDS/IPS systems

IP Protocol (IPv4) classes and subnets

Infrastructure Architecture - Course materials

Introduction to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Fire prevention in the datacenter

Where to build your datacenter

Availability - Fall-back, hot site, warm site

Reliabilty of infrastructure components

Human factors in availability of systems

Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Performance - Design for use

Performance concepts - Load balancing

Performance concepts - Scaling

Performance concept - Caching

Perceived performance

Ethical hacking

The first computers

Open group ITAC /Open CA Certification


Recommended links

Ruth Malan
Gaudi site
Esther Barthel's site on virtualization
Eltjo Poort's site on architecture


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The postings on this site are my opinions and do not necessarily represent CGI’s strategies, views or opinions.

 

Copyright Sjaak Laan