Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a bird which no one has killed and tasted yet. Although we at HCL are not against it, we are walking the path whereby ipads should be part of the network from one-and-a-half years from now.
On the mobile computing front, we are using Blackberry for quite a lot of our senior managers. Around 15,000-20,000 users in HCL are already on the mobile computing devices. Work from home is already in vogue for years.
BYOD is the only thing that is left, which means you bring your own personal device and start working. There are security threats around it. We are doing the assessment but have not adopted it yet. We are cautious on this front because the customer may not allow.
I have a very different opinion on Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). It will be applicable only to those employees who are not on the customer delivery side. Customer permissions are important for bringing all these devices because you have to ensure all kinds of security checks before it gets connected to the network. Importantly, from all of those people who are working on customer network, the threat of data leakage is much more likely from BYOD.
For others, which include people from back office, sales, finance, the senior hierarchy, it is pretty much fine to have BYOD and we are working in that direction. We have already circulated our mobile computing technologies document on this.
Policy is the only way to go forward with BYOD. We are talking to the HR Advisory Council inside HCL management. These are a couple of forums within HCL where we are presenting our thoughts around various transformational changes that IT is trying to bring in. BYOD is also one of them. None of the forum has really said that we must go ahead and deploy. This is because the customer is the king. They feed us the revenue. So we have to have concurrence with them on this, so as to avoid any catastrophe in future.
At the same time, we will be making our infrastructure strong enough so that when we launch this, there should not be any adverse impact. So the network division protocol is what we are trying to work on, whereby before a device gets registered to the network of HCL, it should be properly patched from security standpoint.
