What the heck is BYOD?

[Harmonix]

@Dog80

(BYOD = Bring your own device)
There have always been ways to access corporate services through non-corporate computers via SSH, VPN and the like. What exactly is different now?

…

So what exactly is BYOD?

I am not a IT professional anymore.

But my understanding is that specifically, it’s securing a personal device. This is subtly different than SSH, VPN and the like.

For example, on a corporately controlled blackberry for example, you can access your e-mail. But you know that blackberry is running X OS, and is not hacked, rooted or jail broken in any manner. So that eliminates a whole host of security leaks. You can control exactly what that device can and can’t do.

Now look at a personal device? Well, the problem now is that you don’t control it anymore. The user might put monitoring apps or they might jailbreak or root it in order to gain baser access to the device than you as an IT professional might want. So how do you mitigate that? Well, you knowing about these security risks is the first step. It’s needed contextual knowledge and needed security risk identification. So than you can choose what a program must do in order to be secure-able on a personal device. for example, e-mail.

Well, this e-mail application should have a method of detecting jail broken or rooted phones, and it won’t install onto them.

It should have some method of remotely evaluating and validating its own state so that a nefarious user doesn’t somehow hack the program itself.

Do you want the user to be able to download attachments to the device? (then potentially exporting this confidential information off the device, which you can not monitor). How do you secure this scenario? Does the device have a built in viewer, but not a built in downloader?

Can it be selectively remote wiped? (information in the application only, not the whole phone as i’m sure users would be up in arms about that).

I’m sure there are other use cases you can think up. But in my opinion these are some of the ways BYOD is different than secure access. In short, it has slightly different problems than corporately controlled devices.

[BigT]

@drachillix

Yes they can, it just takes longer. Computer shops like mine make a living providing IT support to a broad spectrum of computer configurations.

Would you really say you’re familiar with everything, or that you just know a bunch of general solutions that work with a lot of situations? Don’t you generally have a specific plan, rather than multiple plans for different configurations?

I know you do in malware removal, as I’ve seen you post what you do–you try different tools in order until the problem is dealt with.

[Voyager]

@Dog80

And now lets talk about the new craze, BYOD. Just visit any random IT related website and you’ll see a mention of BYOD on the front page, how it is the biggest invention since sliced bread etc. etc.

Maybe I am dense, stupid and ignorant and I am missing some key point, but what new concept is brought by BYOD? There have always been ways to access corporate services through non-corporate computers via SSH, VPN and the like. What exactly is different now?

Emails for example, which in my experience is the most important corporate function and most people here will be familiar with, were BYOD-friendly since the first Blackbery came out and even before that.

So what exactly is BYOD?

I think they are just waking up to the fact that Corporate IT can’t keep up with the pace of new devices out there. I’ve been more or less doing it for 20 years.
Heck, 16 years ago my home PC (desktop) was significantly faster than my desktop at work - and I was working at Intel.

As for the cloud, we have an internal cloud (my organization uses thin clients, which work great) but we had better not put anything the least bit sensitive on an external cloud.

[Bouncer]

@Joey_P

I noticed that, I just got tired of looking for a good “old” example. I was just trying to show that clouds have been around for over 20 years, so, when you think about it, it’s not really a surprise when they started calling it the cloud.

I always figured it was because that’s where the magic happens, also technically referred to as “PFM”.

Also, I suppose, there’s no reason why a big business couldn’t have a ‘local cloud’. Maybe they could call it ‘fog’.
“Hey John, where that file?”
“I don’t know, it’s somewhere in the fog”

Could refer to that as:

Dedicated
Intelligent
Local
Lan
Icon based
Group
Access
Filespace

“Hey John, where’s that file?”
“DILLIGAF, my friend, DILLIGAF.”

Regards,
-Bouncer-

[Bouncer]

@drachillix

Yes they can, it just takes longer. Computer shops like mine make a living providing IT support to a broad spectrum of computer configurations.

I dunno, I work for a company that has more than 40000 employees all over the planet. I cannot imagine trying to run an IT support dept that had to cover all possible permutations of the equipment out there. You’d be supporting tons and tons of legacy equipment as well as all the shiny new things. Every OS from WFW 3.11 to whatever is the newest version of MAC OS, plus a variety of Linux OSs. And that, is just the software side, nevermind the hardware.

And keep in mind you may not only have to deal with your internal corporate security policies, but those of your customers as well, especially if dealing with a gov’t agency.

Regards,
-Bouncer-

[treis]

@Dog80

(BYOD = Bring your own device)

This is part rant, part factual question.

In IT, somebody finds a slightly different application of an age old concept, slaps a new, catchy label and a new craze emerges.

Take cloud file services like Dropbox for example (and I speak as a user of dropbox too). I agree that sharing files with dropbox is a nice, trouble-free experience, but we had the same functionality with FTP ages ago. I will agree that most FTP clients are ugly and cryptic for a non technical person but there’s still nothing radically new about Dropbox and besides there are reasons why somebody would still prefer an FTP server instead.

Really? There’s nothing radically new about being able to set up a 10,000 GB folder for a team of 50 people instantly, have it maintain a version history of files automatically, and have it sync to any device they use automatically?

I think the problem is that you don’t understand what people are talking about.

[GIGObuster]

@Joey_P

I noticed that, I just got tired of looking for a good “old” example. I was just trying to show that clouds have been around for over 20 years, so, when you think about it, it’s not really a surprise when they started calling it the cloud.

Also, I suppose, there’s no reason why a big business couldn’t have a ‘local cloud’. Maybe they could call it ‘fog’.
“Hey John, where that file?”
“I don’t know, it’s somewhere in the fog”

I like to see that because of my current circumstances, I usually have to make do with technology that is just about one generation behind and I have to make those computers work for the students, can’t afford better and management does not like to see better progress, not because they are against it, but because they do not like to deploy technology or systems that they do not understand. So, a case of “you go to war with the army you have”

I would love to say to the ones complaining about the problems on locating files that, “I don’t know, they are hard to find in the fog of war”.

[qbadger]

I think there is a cheat code to turn that off. You should be able to look it up in the Cloud.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@Justin_Bailey

Serious question from a co-worker the other day: “Will The Cloud ever run out of room?”

Warning sign: Apparently certain Rolling Stones MP3s keep telling other users to get off of it.

[Dog80]

@Harmonix

I am not a IT professional anymore.

But my understanding is that specifically, it’s securing a personal device. This is subtly different than SSH, VPN and the like.

[snip]

Thanks! This is exactly the description I was looking for.

[Justin_Bailey]

@treis

Really? There’s nothing radically new about being able to set up a 10,000 GB folder for a team of 50 people instantly, have it maintain a version history of files automatically, and have it sync to any device they use automatically?

Online storage services have existed since the mid-2000s and the technology behind them isn’t radically different from FTP. That’s the problem a lot of people have with the concept of “the cloud.”

[Quartz]

@Bouncer

“DILLIGAF, my friend, DILLIGAF.”

Hehehehe!

(I’m surprised that this has so far gone unappreciated.)

[treis]

@Justin_Bailey

Online storage services have existed since the mid-2000s and the technology behind them isn’t radically different from FTP. That’s the problem a lot of people have with the concept of “the cloud.”

If this is your standard for radically different, there hasn’t been any radically different developments in computers for like 20 years.

[Mama_Zappa]

My company is starting to allow BYOD but there are very strict requirements - including, for example, that if you’re using it for company business (emails in particular), nobody else in the family is allowed to use it even to play games etc. So I haven’t bothered. Fortunately, the only personally-owned device I “need” to use for work is my cell phone.

And use of cloud-based storage (e.g. Dropbox) is strictly forbidden for anything that might be client or company confidential material. Which makes sense - my employer has no way of knowing whether such data is stored securely enough, and a breach could be anywhere from “annoyance” to “holy shit, what have I done”.

Re FTP vs Dropbox and not radically different: Um, the basic concept and the hardware requirement may not be that different: you’ve got a file, you upload it and there’s a copy on a hard drive somewhere other than your house, and you can download it later on… yeah, that’s the same.

The difference - and it is dramatic - is how seamlessly it works. For FTP you have to manually upload, then manually download onto the other machine, and if you change the file contents, how do you get things straightened out. The dramatic difference is in the execution, and all the things you can now do easily since the synching is so seamless.

[Nava]

… I’ve been working BYOD for most of the last, uh, 17 years. Just never had a FLA for it What’s a bloody pain in the ass is when you have a contractual requirement to BYOD but ah, it must comply with the client’s obsolete specs, but that’s finally being phased out - sort of.

And the phasing out is certainly “customer driven”, but that’s what happens when you hire a bunch of highly-paid consultants, tell them to BTOD and then whine if half of them have Macs (including the weekend musician) and ten per cent are penguins. IT departments have finally realized they have to either give everybody including subcontractors a computer “set up according to corporate standards”, or come up with corporate standards that do not depend on hardware or OS.