It really depends on the IT department and which applications you need to run. If everything you need to access is through a Web interface (perhaps over a VPN) then, policy permitting, there's no technical reason that you can't use pretty much any endpoint device you want that supports the necessary Web standards--and possibly VPN client.
Generally speaking, formal BYOPC programs are more restrictive but in lots of high tech companies, people use a variety of their own gear.
As far as I'm concerned that's a deal breaker. Dont tell me that I have to pay for my own laptop and then mandate what OS I run. You want to control what OS, you pay for it.
So if I can't afford to buy my own high-end computer, I have to use one of the loaners from work. And those loaners won't be anywhere near as nice as the ones that people have bought.
So now my job performance depends on how much money I'm willing to spend on products that are for the company's benefit. If I'm not willing to cough up enough dough, I won't get good reviews or raises. I might even be fired for under-performing!
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea... If you want to invite lawsuits.
Having said that, I bring my own mouse and keyboard to work. I didn't ask, I just did it. The comfort was worth more to me than it was to them, apparently.
The majority of applications being remotely virtualized in this manner are/will be general business applications--word processor, spreadsheet, etc--or line of business applications such as CRM or ticket management systems. These don't need much horsepower, and, in the case of Citrix-based application virtualization, can run on the providing server ("streamed") or have the bits delivered locally to the client for it to execute. I think Microsoft's App-V (SoftGrid) works the same way, but I'm unsure if it does streaming or just packaged delivery. Either way, a pool laptop need not be that powerful to "keep up with the Jonses'" who bought their own.
From what I've seen, App-V is on-demand packaged delivery. If you access a binary and it's not on your system (or needs to be updated), it'll download then execute locally.
Tools for developers and designers is a big point. Especially with new hires.
Ten years ago joining a major corporation gave you access to resources you didn't have on your own. Exchange was better than Yahoo mail. The T20 cost so much almost no one would buy it for personal use.
Today when student graduate they are often used to and already own Mac laptops or high-end PCs and are using Google services. They can lose productivity going from these (cloud) consumer to enterprise technology systems.
I recommend the Gartner report "Gartner_Report_BYOC_checklist.pdf" on BYOC.
Most tradesmen have leeway in buying the tools that suit them best. This doesn't work in a corporation, as the amount of work IT would have to do to support every different computer that wanders in would be insane. Look at a college that has this laptop purchase program: students get a choice between Mac and a Dell laptop, and unless you're a fine-arts major you don't get the Mac option.
More likely, employees would be forced to buy the one computer that IT specifies. And, knowing how much VB.NET code is running out there now, it'll end up being a top-of-the-line enterprise Dell laptop, crippled with XP and all of their network policies.
Somebody who's forced to buy a laptop and then give all control away won't be a happy body.
I think IT often overestimates the actual extra burden that would be required to support more devices and the risks associated. At the last company I worked at there were calls for people to be publicly made "examples of" for running Firefox as it was deemed too much of a support burden to have to support both IE and Firefox and a security threat. Then they found out the CEO had installed it and their tone changed from calling for a witch hunt to a begrudged "you can run it but we won't support it".
If they're firing people for using Firefox, that's one thing. That's just absurd.
But having people bring in their home computers that might be virus-infected or part of a botnet to work? Err, no. I've had more than one home computer brought to me to fix and I have never once let them on the network. I don't need to find out that the next Sasser/Blaster/whatever is now rampaging through our internal network.
That's not to say that there aren't people and companies (likely small ones) that couldn't handle this. But unless each person was a pretty decent computer admin who was not likely to install crapware, kept themselves patched, etc., I wouldn't trust them at all.
But, like I said, I've seen the home machines of the people at work and I've removed viruses from them. There's no way I'd put them on our network even though I don't think there's anything they could infect. It's just not smart.
Tradesmen provide their own tools if they are independently employed. If they are employed directly through a big firm, the firm often buys all their equipment for them, including a loaner truck and cell phone.
If you're in the kind of job where your job performance will be substantially impacted by the newness of your computer, you should also be earning enough to afford a new computer considerably sooner than your first performance review.
There are various reasons why that may not be the case. For example, the employee may have had the misfortune of recently having been made redundant and subsequently spent their savings and accumulated debt whilst searching for a new job.
And maybe they don't have a car to get to work, or shiny shoes to match their suit, or a dozen other things which cost more than the computer they probably already have.
Suits can be found in charity shops and shoes are cheap if you buy them in end of season sales. Whether or not you drive to work is down to necessity I guess. For some it's a necessary evil, especially if they live and work a long way apart.
I don't really see how this applies. Some people are fortunate that they may be able to afford to buy a computer for work, others less so. It's not a one size fits all situation, and whether or not the speed of someone's workstation would make a difference to their job hasn't much bearing on it.
Of course, the article is confused between people working via remote desktop and people providing their own compute power, which kind of muddies the topic.
I have done work in the past on my own machine of course, but I think for companies to come to expect this is placing an unhealthy burden on the employee. Personal machines are not necessarily reliable, nor can they often be repaired or replaced at short notice. If I was required to take work home, I would prefer to have a machine dedicated to that purpose, and I certainly wouldn't be happy about the idea of having to provide it myself.
Where remote access is concerned, it becomes more a matter of preference. A faster machine in this instance is unlikely to make much difference, so this becomes less of an issue. Here an employee providing their own machine would be doing it more for personal preference or comfort.
As I say below, this is simply not true... Have a look at what designers, junior architects, people doing 3D modeling e.g. for movies, people retouching photos for print, etc actually get paid.
If anything, the opposite is true... As a programmer, I can tell you I could get a lot done with not much power, and I say this having developed professionally on a SPARC 10 (look up the specs, and I don't mean an Ultra 10).
This sounds a bit dramatic given that laptop computers fully capable of running typical business applications are no more than $1K these days (and can be quite a bit less). There are lots of things you may need to (or be advantaged by) spending money on depending on the job. For example, if you're in a sales job in certain industries, you'll need to spend quite a bit of money on clothing (suits, etc.). Relatively few companies supply cell phones today, although some may pay for data plans. Maybe commuting to your job is the only reason you need a car.
There are certainly complexities to bring-your-own-PC programs, especially with less technically savvy users, but the personal cost aspect isn't really one of them. (Especially given that most such programs have a subsidy.)
Note the alternative presented: "Citrix gives staff a stipend and they then buy the computer of their choice."
That would work for me (as an employee).
However, if I ran a despotic company where employees were apt to act out against "the man" I'd be pretty nervous about letting Pandora bring in her own box, so to speak.
When I worked as an employee I felt my job performance was hampered by the company policy of what went into the computers. (eg. they were crap). I swapped out just about every component I could in those machines, some funded by the company, some funded personally.
Most professionals are expected to maintain their own tools.
Most mechanics have their own tools, having the tools you like to use at your disposal is essential to doing a good job. The tools are also far more expensive than a computer.
Personally, I would have loved to be able to bring my own computer to work and would have allowed me to drop the hassle of trying to hide the improvements I was making to their dev machine.
Buying your own computer in dev is kind of like a lawyer buying his own suits. It may affect his job if he doesn't look sharp. There are lots of places to work and if the place you work at doesn't recognize the additional productivity you have gained from buying good tools then perhaps it is not the place one should work.
At my job I had the choice of the company buying me a Windows-based Dell notebook, or just using my own personal MacBook Pro that I paid for; I chose the latter. Sometimes I get a little riled up about the fact that they didn't offer to reimburse me for the expense, but on the other hand I'm glad that I wasn't forced to use the same tools everyone else does.
Most professionals have and maintain their own tools -- but tools in most other professions if poorly secured can't emit malware that sabotages everybody else's tools.
My point is, I think there a lot of examples on both sides.
A reasonable company should not argue about a $1.5K versus $3K laptop when they're paying so much more for salary, benefits, and overhead for the person using the system. At my workplace these total around $250K-$280K per person per year.
An alternative way to do this is for you to go buy your choice of equipment then get reimbursed by the company for the expense within a reasonable limit. I imagine this keeps it as a pre-tax expense for the company as well. One could argue that how it is now it's still "your" money that gets spent anyway since you need a computer to work - it's just that the company spends it for you and gives you no choice in the matter.
I worked at a company that tried this in the late nineties. They ran afoul tax and accounting problems, since it wasn't seen as a business expense but rather more like a bonus since you kept the hardware if you left the company.
You know you can just ask your company for ergonomic hardware, right? Companies have ergonomics guides and have to abide by them. If you have an uncomfortable chair, or a keyboard/mouse that brings about early signs of carpel tunnel, you have the right to request a new keyboard/mouse at the expense of the company. It's in the company's best interest to avoid (at best) paying long-term disability from you being injured and (at worst) a lawsuit for providing tools that injure you on the job and refusing to help you alleviate the pain.
Hardly a unique problem to using personal devices. Also from the article:
"The design that we implemented was that no data or access to the device was enabled locally, so you can plug in your USB but it would not be registered when you have a Citrix connection."
To take another example of forcing security in a client device. I have push email from the office to my iPhone but it's implemented in such a way that forces using a passcode to access the iPhone.
This isn't "bring your own computer", but "use your own computer to connect remotely and access the firm's computer". The data's still held inside the firm and the employee's PC isn't doing anything more than running a web browser.
The first few paragraphs miss the point, though: they imply that this kind of remote access is quicker if you're using a brand new laptop than some old Windows XP PC.
The caption on the image of the iPad is misleading. If I´m not mistaken, virtualisation is not permitted on iPads even if they were capable; the picture seems to be illustrating remote desktop.
That's the case for all examples here - they are virtualizing your "desktop" on a server and all you're doing is remoting in. AKA thin client aka what the industry has been trying to sell for 20 years. Pretty much the same as: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
One advantage of unified computer inventory is faster and cheaper service. Software installation tend to be much easier when hardware is unified as well. BYOC is a worst nightmare of system administrators and technicians.
I notice the gratuitous inclusion of a silly quote about tablets (BYOT). Using your own hardware is ok, provided that the company is prepared to accept any security issues which could arise from that.
"One of the prerequisites is to have a standard McAfee anti-virus installed on the device."
Forgive me while I laugh at this. If an employee's computer is compromised, the company VMs running inside it are vulnerable. It makes no difference that the connection is secure if one endpoint is not.
The safe way to do it is to hand the employee a locked down device strictly for work.
An alternative, maybe, is to hand them a locked hypervisor which allows them to run personal, alongside work VMs (but not allow them to install anything at the same level as the hypervisor (no dual-booting)).
Edit: Thinking about this, the company may issue USB secure tokens linked to a truecrypt drive. The employee would dual-boot either into the work environment (locked down) or a personal environment, with the warning that the token must never be connected in the personal environment.
Not sure if you already knew about this and are just joking, but the locked hypervisor approach is actually one that Citrix (mentioned in the article) is touting.. their XenClient stuff does that.
Related issue: employees issued company laptops tend to drop them, forget them in starbucks, leave them in cabs, and generally lose them fairly frequently when the company replaces them. If the company only pays for a replacement every 18-24 months, the employees' memory suddenly and quite drastically improves. Almost like a shot of mega-ginkgo.
For a while, I worked at a company that had a "lose your laptop and get fired" policy. They backed down after less than a year, but it definitely caused me to think twice about where I stored my laptop at home and on the road.
I've working in small tech companies and have used my personal laptop as a work machine, so in theory I'm not opposed to it. But if you want to mandate it, I get to choose the OS and I get root.
I've been using my own Mac at work for the last 4 years, at 3 different companies (granted, one of them was my own startup). The caveat is you have to support yourself, which is fine by me. I get to use the environment I'm most comfortable in and I don't have to deal with crappy Windows updates, virus or Outlook headaches.
I'm nearly in the same boat. I've been at the same company for some time now and started bringing my personal macbook to work to code on. After awhile, I was so productive they bought me a one for work use. However in a 1000+ person company I'm the only one on a Mac, but I also have to do my own support.
I don't think employees should buy their own computer, but having the freedom to do so is liberating. However, I don't think it fits very well into an argument for remote desktop systems. That's more to do with the user being remote from work than having their own computer.
I work remotely, from home, using my own hardware. That means I have administrative access, an SSD, 12GB of memory, overclocked i7 CPU, etc., which all adds up to a machine that can build our source tree faster than the build servers that are "optimized" for it by IT. When I visit base, co-workers are amazed at my build times; usually less than 50% of the time on their workstations.
Most of these advantages would be negated by using a remote desktop / app solution, but then, the advantages may be largely specific to certain kinds of workloads.
For the scenario described this is a security nightmare. Instead of having to expend a lot of effort targeting your organisation, profiling your defences and attempting to bypass your security (doable but will require some effort in many cases) I now just have to attack your personal email, get you to click on a link to my attack, compromise your box, install a keylogger then route my terminal services/citrix ica connection through your desktop and logon with your credentials to get in.
Any company of a reasonable size has lots of consultants walking around, all with their own laptop, and sensitive company information on them. Giving people their own laptop to manage is really not much different.
I disagree with regards to how different it is. Those consultants are a relatively small proportion of the estate of such companies. Furthermore companies of sufficient size to have permanent levels of consultants connected to their internal networks and running their data have fairly nasty clauses mandating security requirements for said laptops to connect to their networks, with significant consequences for failure (both for the individual and supplier).
The consultants walking around with their own laptops generally have internally mandated compliance requirements for things like encryption, host firewalls and antivirus.
We've done something like this at my previous company. The lesson I learned was that it works really well for some staff but that it goes poorly for the non-technically inclined.
We ended up having a scaled down IT services for the "poets" and the techies could use their own thing. That worked well and people were happy, although security was an ongoing debate since laptops get stolen a lot and people don't tend to put encryption on anything unless you force them to. We ended up doing "spot checks" on various occasions to check if backups/etc, were up to scratch.
After I left new management was too worried about security and brought it back in house (although we'd never had serious incidents). The dissatisfaction that caused among employees was huge, it's really much harder to give up freedom than if you've never had it in the first place.
I worked for a startup that made owning / bringing a laptop to the office a requirement of employment. We had one incredibly awkward incident in which we hired a kid without making this rule clear to him. He showed up for work on day one empty handed, was called into our founder's office, left ten minutes later and never came back. It was a bad idea with even worse implementation. Often times our founders wouldn't mention this requirement in the interview. "You got the jobs! Congrats! Oh, and by the way..." It was terrible and the company failed.
While I don't believe that employees need to buy their own computer, I've not hesitated to buy a notebook and use it for work if I thought it necessary. When I started at my current workplace, I didn't realise that the employer provided PCs were XP machines and that developers didn't get admin access. After a few weeks it was too frustrating to not get a notebook and use it at work.
An employee using their own computer presets all sorts of liabilities and risks both to the employee and the employer. The decision needs to be made in consultation with a qualified lawyer. It presents an intellectual property and security nightmare.
61 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI wonder if people get to chose their OS under this scheme?
So properly not.
Double-checking still left me with some (tiny bit of) hope : http://www.mcafee.com/us/products/virusscan-enterprise-for-l...
Generally speaking, formal BYOPC programs are more restrictive but in lots of high tech companies, people use a variety of their own gear.
So now my job performance depends on how much money I'm willing to spend on products that are for the company's benefit. If I'm not willing to cough up enough dough, I won't get good reviews or raises. I might even be fired for under-performing!
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea... If you want to invite lawsuits.
Having said that, I bring my own mouse and keyboard to work. I didn't ask, I just did it. The comfort was worth more to me than it was to them, apparently.
Ten years ago joining a major corporation gave you access to resources you didn't have on your own. Exchange was better than Yahoo mail. The T20 cost so much almost no one would buy it for personal use.
Today when student graduate they are often used to and already own Mac laptops or high-end PCs and are using Google services. They can lose productivity going from these (cloud) consumer to enterprise technology systems.
I recommend the Gartner report "Gartner_Report_BYOC_checklist.pdf" on BYOC.
More likely, employees would be forced to buy the one computer that IT specifies. And, knowing how much VB.NET code is running out there now, it'll end up being a top-of-the-line enterprise Dell laptop, crippled with XP and all of their network policies.
Somebody who's forced to buy a laptop and then give all control away won't be a happy body.
But having people bring in their home computers that might be virus-infected or part of a botnet to work? Err, no. I've had more than one home computer brought to me to fix and I have never once let them on the network. I don't need to find out that the next Sasser/Blaster/whatever is now rampaging through our internal network.
That's not to say that there aren't people and companies (likely small ones) that couldn't handle this. But unless each person was a pretty decent computer admin who was not likely to install crapware, kept themselves patched, etc., I wouldn't trust them at all.
But, like I said, I've seen the home machines of the people at work and I've removed viruses from them. There's no way I'd put them on our network even though I don't think there's anything they could infect. It's just not smart.
I don't really see how this applies. Some people are fortunate that they may be able to afford to buy a computer for work, others less so. It's not a one size fits all situation, and whether or not the speed of someone's workstation would make a difference to their job hasn't much bearing on it.
Of course, the article is confused between people working via remote desktop and people providing their own compute power, which kind of muddies the topic.
I have done work in the past on my own machine of course, but I think for companies to come to expect this is placing an unhealthy burden on the employee. Personal machines are not necessarily reliable, nor can they often be repaired or replaced at short notice. If I was required to take work home, I would prefer to have a machine dedicated to that purpose, and I certainly wouldn't be happy about the idea of having to provide it myself.
Where remote access is concerned, it becomes more a matter of preference. A faster machine in this instance is unlikely to make much difference, so this becomes less of an issue. Here an employee providing their own machine would be doing it more for personal preference or comfort.
If anything, the opposite is true... As a programmer, I can tell you I could get a lot done with not much power, and I say this having developed professionally on a SPARC 10 (look up the specs, and I don't mean an Ultra 10).
There are certainly complexities to bring-your-own-PC programs, especially with less technically savvy users, but the personal cost aspect isn't really one of them. (Especially given that most such programs have a subsidy.)
That would work for me (as an employee).
However, if I ran a despotic company where employees were apt to act out against "the man" I'd be pretty nervous about letting Pandora bring in her own box, so to speak.
Most professionals are expected to maintain their own tools.
Most mechanics have their own tools, having the tools you like to use at your disposal is essential to doing a good job. The tools are also far more expensive than a computer.
Personally, I would have loved to be able to bring my own computer to work and would have allowed me to drop the hassle of trying to hide the improvements I was making to their dev machine.
Buying your own computer in dev is kind of like a lawyer buying his own suits. It may affect his job if he doesn't look sharp. There are lots of places to work and if the place you work at doesn't recognize the additional productivity you have gained from buying good tools then perhaps it is not the place one should work.
My point is, I think there a lot of examples on both sides.
A reasonable company should not argue about a $1.5K versus $3K laptop when they're paying so much more for salary, benefits, and overhead for the person using the system. At my workplace these total around $250K-$280K per person per year.
"The design that we implemented was that no data or access to the device was enabled locally, so you can plug in your USB but it would not be registered when you have a Citrix connection."
To take another example of forcing security in a client device. I have push email from the office to my iPhone but it's implemented in such a way that forces using a passcode to access the iPhone.
The first few paragraphs miss the point, though: they imply that this kind of remote access is quicker if you're using a brand new laptop than some old Windows XP PC.
Forgive me while I laugh at this. If an employee's computer is compromised, the company VMs running inside it are vulnerable. It makes no difference that the connection is secure if one endpoint is not.
The safe way to do it is to hand the employee a locked down device strictly for work.
An alternative, maybe, is to hand them a locked hypervisor which allows them to run personal, alongside work VMs (but not allow them to install anything at the same level as the hypervisor (no dual-booting)).
Edit: Thinking about this, the company may issue USB secure tokens linked to a truecrypt drive. The employee would dual-boot either into the work environment (locked down) or a personal environment, with the warning that the token must never be connected in the personal environment.
I work remotely, from home, using my own hardware. That means I have administrative access, an SSD, 12GB of memory, overclocked i7 CPU, etc., which all adds up to a machine that can build our source tree faster than the build servers that are "optimized" for it by IT. When I visit base, co-workers are amazed at my build times; usually less than 50% of the time on their workstations.
Most of these advantages would be negated by using a remote desktop / app solution, but then, the advantages may be largely specific to certain kinds of workloads.
Nice try, Citrix PR Company.
The consultants walking around with their own laptops generally have internally mandated compliance requirements for things like encryption, host firewalls and antivirus.
We ended up having a scaled down IT services for the "poets" and the techies could use their own thing. That worked well and people were happy, although security was an ongoing debate since laptops get stolen a lot and people don't tend to put encryption on anything unless you force them to. We ended up doing "spot checks" on various occasions to check if backups/etc, were up to scratch.
After I left new management was too worried about security and brought it back in house (although we'd never had serious incidents). The dissatisfaction that caused among employees was huge, it's really much harder to give up freedom than if you've never had it in the first place.