Nick Jones

One of the themes emerging from attendees here in Cannes is the growing problem of employee-owned devices. An informal poll of the audience at yesterday’s mobile scenario presentation showed around 50 percent who expected they’d have to support more employee-owned mobiles accessing corporate systems in the future. User demand for consumer devices like iPhone is a problem, but at least if the enterprise owns the device it can maintain some delusions of control. (Even if its an iPhone which is intrinsically pretty unmanageable because Apple don’t really care about corporate management; and they haven’t yet opened up the platform enough to permit 3rd parties to fill the gaps). However, once the device is owned by an employee the challenges double. You can’t install management software on devices you don’t own, so any control has to be via policies or software in the cloud. Technologically there are some approaches such as Network Access Control (NAC) which work pretty well for PCs, but they struggle with non-Intel devices like smartphones and some netbooks.

However, employee-owned devices aren’t only a problem, they’re an opportunity too. Smartphones will become the default device in Europe; by 2013 we expect around 80 percent of handsets shipped here to be smartphones. So if someone already has a smartphone, why should the enterprise provide another one? Not only can you not prevent employees using their own devices, you may even want to encourage it as a cost-saving opportunity. So better start looking at technologies such as NAC today.