BYOD: Striking the Right Balance

I currently use MacBook Air, after a recent switch from a Windows-powered laptop. At office, my laptop takes center stage by default. Working on documents, proposals, presen-tations, number crunching on Excel sheets, testing updates at CBAZAAR. COM, browsing through multiple browsers, video conferencing, are just few of the many activities I do on my laptop. The comfort of a full-sized keyboard along with mouse trackpad makes life easy during busy hours.

I switched to the MacBook simply because it is lightweight (easy to carry around), fast, reliable and is well lit. The crystal clear screen takes strain off my eyes, making sure a lengthy day at work wouldn't leave my eyes hurt. The wide screen also ensures that I never miss any detail.

Apart from the MacBook, the other Apple product that provides good company right through the day, is the iPad (1st generation). I tend to consume social media apps on the iPad more frequently. Facebook, Twitter are used to keep in touch with my pals. LinkedIn serves to touch base with professional contacts. Of late, am investing time on Pinterest. I also frequent the NDTV App, which helps me keep tab on the latest news and weather. The iPad also comes in handy to check our in house ERP, which surprisingly works stupendously on the iPad. By now you must have assumed that probably I'm an Apple guy but there's a small twist in the tale, I carry an Android Mobile - Samsung Galaxy S II (might convert to Apple at some point in the future though). It is a power packed handset, so whenever my iPad is not around I take to Social Media via this mobile.

Since I travel a lot, these mobile devices are a huge life line. The GTalk app keeps me connected with business critical contacts (I'm kinda online 24X7 ). I also discovered a brilliant peer-to-peer calling App - Viber, which also works on a 2G network (though their website says 3G and Wi-Fi only ). This has allowed me to save big time on international calling.

In our organization, we permit employees to bring their own devices to work. Bringing personal devices might hamper productivity, reduce concentration and probably distract employees as those devices might contain media which might be deemed counterproductive, such as games, music & video files, social media apps, etc. It would be extremely hard for an employer to monitor and moderate such high risk activities.

We have installed highly secure firewalls in our organization which protect us from both external & internal threats. Our ERP which holds business critical information is a web-based application which calls for secure transfer of data and zero tolerance to security loopholes. Employees have role-based access to ERP, ie, a finance executive has access to Finance domain only and sales personnel are limited to CRM. To reinforce the security of our ERP, we are working on a one-time password based login.