Public sector and academia struggling with 'bring your own device' demands

Public sector and education bodies are having difficulties supporting staff in their desire to bring personal technology to work, as the consumerisation of IT trend gathers pace.

At an HP roundtable event on Thursday, the London Borough of Newham and Nottingham Trent University described the problems they face supporting the 'bring your own device' trend that is sweeping the public and private sectors.

Central government policy requires local authorities and universities to cut costs, but supporting an increasing number of devices costs money.

However, both organisations believe it important to support more of their staff's chosen technology because it gives them an incentive to work in a smarter way.

Geoff Connell, ICT director at Newham, said that his IT department currently supports 5,000 devices but expects this figure to grow significantly in the next few years.

"We have started supporting the iPad, and work with our HR department to accommodate staff that want to bring their iPads into work," he said.

Connell added that part of the difficulty is deciding which applications to give staff access to on each device the IT department decides to support.

"We have to be controlled about this. We need to make sure that the apps staff can access on their smartphones can easily be wiped should anything happen. Some apps we just have to say no to," he said.

Connell explained that Newham mostly supports staff on Windows phones, although 60 out of the council's 5,000 staff have access to a BlackBerry.

The IT department is supporting iPhones on a trial basis at the moment, but Android phones are not given any support.

"We don't support Android phones yet as we believe they are vulnerable when it comes to security, but they will be supported when we bring in a new security wrapper that will allow us to support more smartphones easily and safely. We support iPhones on a case-by-case basis," said Connell.

Mike Day, IT services director at Nottingham Trent University, encourages university staff to bring their own devices.

"We cope with researchers bringing in all kinds of technology that we need to support. Once we felt we had to tolerate it, but now we actively support it," he said.

Day explained that some researchers at the univesity even need support for cloud systems.

"Some researchers have to keep their data for a lengthy period and they choose to store it in the Amazon cloud. We have to think carefully about how these clouds get incorporated in our own infrastructure," he said.