Bring your own device strategies are infiltrating businesses around the world as more and more employees are not only demanding but requiring increased mobility. As this initiative continues to be leveraged within all types of workplaces, employees are allowed to select the device they feel most comfortable using for both business and personal use, helping enterprise to significantly cut costs. Something you may or may not know though is that without cloud services and Desktop-as-a-Service, BYOD wouldn’t even be possible.

This plan of action enables workers to complete time-sensitive tasks from virtually anywhere and at anytime, as long as they have a reliable Internet connection in place. In a recent podcast titled “Embracing BYOD” presented by cloud services provider NaviSite and Desktone , it was revealed that with BYOD, there are countless implications for IT departments.

First, they must ensure corporate desktop security, which includes managing, protecting, delivering and assessing all aspects of employee usage; power business continuity, which can dramatically lower the disruption that a company could potentially see when implementing new devices into the corporate network; and keeping performance at a high level so it is satisfactory to all users.

 Company officials stated, “The Desktop-as-a-Service model really says let’s take the benefits of onsite virtualization which lowers costs and offers centralized management and marry that with the benefits of the cloud which are elasticity, self-service, and on-demand.”

Thus, this next-generation desktop model makes its much less complex for IT to leverage BYOD, as it enhances security and makes policies easier to enforce due to the fact that data resides in a secure and compliant data center and fully defined security boundaries are put in place right from the very beginning. This then allows IT to focus on supporting the corporate desktop rather than the device, allowing resources to be assigned to more strategic initiatives. It also ramps up workforce productivity as hardware downtime is no longer productivity downtime.

When seamlessly integrating Desktop-as-a-Service with BYOD, organizations can see multiple advantages including reducing TCO for employee desktops, increasing data security and compliance for endpoints, implementing business continuity and disaster recovery for all users, providing greater control and flexibility and increasing speed of time to market. In essence, DaaS keeps the complexity beneath the surface.

For a company leveraging BYOD specifically, they can reduce IT support costs if expectations are established up front with employees and business leaders, lower device onboarding / offboarding costs, billing support costs and help desk support costs, Troy Fulton, director of Product Marketing, Tangoe (News - Alert) Inc., told me in an exclusive interview.

Two main factors that have led to the rapid explosion of BYOD are the consumerization of IT and the introduction of mobile-centric enterprises.

The consumerization of information technology essentially means that in previous years, new products initially became popular within the consumer industry rather than the enterprise. Today, with products such as Android (News - Alert)-based phones and the iPad, companies are increasingly using them for business-related practices than consumers are for day-to-day activities.

Additionally, the majority of enterprises now utilizing mobile devices as the main form of communication are enabling this trend of bring your own device to the workplace to continue. 

It is vital for firms in every industry to turn to the cloud when using BYOD as it offers an “infrastructure for elastic scalability at a low cost and risk. Most enterprise environments cannot easily or cost-effectively scale to support the influx of mobile devices and cloud service providers can provide turn on/ turn off flexible access to infrastructure,” Fulton added.

 Application delivery flexibility especially for thin-client or HTML5 based apps is also provided as you do not want latency in this connection intensive architecture strategy.

Fulton stated, “This will be more prevalent in 2013 because native apps are less powerful generally than apps available behind the firewall accessed via desktop pc. The other issue is that device manufacturers will offer lower power, less cost devices for HTML5 and thin-client apps. Companies can lower both CapEx and OpEx by updating the app behind the firewall and not across all devices.”

Large enterprises contemplating utilizing the BYOD trend are increasingly turning to NaviSite (News - Alert), a company known for its DaaS platform.

“The predictions industry pundits have made about the rise of BYOD have come to pass, and its adoption is happening at an accelerated rate,” said David Grimes, chief technology officer at NaviSite. “Our DaaS offering, NaviCloud ONE, is allowing businesses to embrace BYOD while ensuring security of corporate data, enabling IT to set clear policies around usage and support, while employees easily access their desktops from anywhere and on multiple-devices.

Complete with the ability to launch new desktops in a very short period of time, some other capabilities of the robust solution include the fact that it enables employees to work on-the-go without any affect to productivity, all while remaining compliant with multiple security policies; workers can select and utilize the device they feel most comfortable with while simultaneously adhering to internal IT mandates; corporate security is raised to an unparalleled level; disaster recovery down to the employee level is readily available; and companies can easily expand their footprint while gaining access to a much less complex desktop infrastructure.