http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20539715

Thoughts please

Sounds like a legal nightmare to me...

A big issue for my IT dept is who is responsible for the device when it goes wrong a staff member is using it for work. Councils will need a watertight policy here.

I work for a tour operator and a lot of resort staff use their own laptops for work. There are company machines in the hotels. In this case we won't take repsonsibilty. Head office staff don't need use their own laptops but some are using their personal iPads when they travel. Our view is that it is your device and you are responsible if it goes wrong if you are on a work trip. This applies to anyone taking their own laptop instead.

We also have strict rules about personal machines: They are not allowed to connect to VPN, WebDAV or the head office LAN but we do provide WiFI which is on a seperate IP range so there is net access without access to the LAN.

We are moving to a fully hosted environment so anyone using a personal device needs only a remote desktop connection to the system. Nothing needs to be done on their devices so a lot of the risk is negated as everything is done in a data centre.

I agree it will be a legal nightmare.

If my company wants me to do a job, I expect them to provide me with the tools.

One real benefit I can see from this is that it might drive companies towards cross-platform software and away from the single-platform hegemonies of products like Office.

Office will still be dominant.

What about those who don't have their own laptops? As above, how much tech support are you going to provide? What about risk of malware transmission? Data loss?

IIRC, Pcpro did an article on this which covered the salient points.

I guess it all comes down to service support agreements.

Mark

Security is the biggest problem. If you have personally identifiable data on the machine (or access to PID on the company network), then the machine has to be secured - pin code as a minimum and you can't let non-employees access to the device.

That means, that you iPad can't be shared with partner or children any more, for example.

A lot of people won't agree to that.

In which case I won't be taking part.

The thought of that ribbon bollocks getting anywhere near a computer I've bought gives me a rash

There will also be the problem of what happens if the laptop is stolen and it has council data on it? It will most likely not be backed up or secure.

Oooh, I'd dump it on Dropbox just to be sure.

Yes but how many have a secure drop box password?

BYOD only works if people RDP to a VDI. That way the data is safe & never touches the device.

Though would that be cost effective for a council with thousands of different devices to support? It might go from iOS devices to laptops to android devices.

Council IT won't support the laptop,. Just the app that connects to the VDI platform