Given the time of year, you could be forgiven for turning up at work with a nice bottle of red having misheard someone in the office telling you to B.Y.O.D. in to work tomorrow, however give it a few months and this acronym might be a policy heard commonly in the workplace. B.Y.O.D. stands for “bring your own device”, a new initiative being implemented by some companies across a number of industries. It allows employees to use their own laptops or phones in the workplace to access company data or receive emails to their iPhones. Given the rate in which our technology improves, most people usually have better equipment at home than they use in the office, and of course are more comfortable using it.
Of course, this initiative has divided opinions; on the one hand you have the company security and data protection to consider, and on the other this resourcefulness will save companies a tidy sum on their technology overheads. The general consensus about the idea as a whole is that it IS going to happen, and governing bodies have already started issuing guidelines, as well as informing enterprises to put B.Y.O.D. policies in place. A balance of cost efficiency and security could be hard to find.
Seeing as this is a blog from Telecoms company, it was inevitable that we would end up talking about something industry specific eventually, but a good example of the equilibrium can be found in FMC technology. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is a feature of the N-Connect VoIP phone system that allows employees to use their mobile phone as a device coupled to their office phone extension. Handy if you are out of the office or working from home, but more applicably it can provide the sense of balance companies need when considering B.Y.O.D. It saves money, as colleagues trying to reach an employee at home don’t have to call mobile numbers; they simply dial the internal office extension number for that person. There is no need for a company mobile phone, as the employee is using their own smartphone, and calls made through the application are charged through your main office VoIP system. The application is also voice encrypted with Secure Real Time Transport Protocol (SRTP), meaning that it is safeguarded when transferring multimedia content via network structures, as well as an ever changing cryptography key when making calls.
Well, we did say it was a good example! For more information regarding the N-Connect VoIP phone systems featuring FMC, please visit our new website, at www.directfromthecloud.co.uk