The Byod Scheme Overview

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

This is a proposal for a tailor-made Bring Your Own Device Policy (BYOD) plan for Infosys. I found inspiration in your last Town Hall session where you discussed about the company’s plans to implement strategic changes in IT operations for transforming business and optimizing costs. As an information security consultant in the Systems Integration practice, I have keenly observed our internal IT operations from an Information Security and future feasibility standpoint. My proposal addresses the ongoing initiative to keep pace with the latest technology trends as well as reduce our long-term technology costs.

Current scenario

Infosys’ weak financial performance over the past few quarters has brought rising operating costs to the forefront. [1] Some of the ongoing concerns related to our internal operations are as follows:

Increasing IT installation costs - Our infrastructure is almost completely dominated by physical workstations. We are installing workstations at a much higher rate than we did in the past, owing to addition of 20,000- 30,000 new hires each fiscal year. [2] We need to rethink this workstation-dominant model to enable greater flexibility and productivity.

Growing IT administrative costs - With increasing headcount, we are only adding to our IT administrative and maintenance costs. As per the last annual report, maintenance costs grew by 13.4%. [3] 

Changing delivery landscape - With greater focus on maintenance and consulting engagements that represent over 50% of our revenue, we need to ensure better mobility of our workforce. [4] We now need more employees in a 24/7 environment. The late night cab service to ferry employees has been a matter of continual discussion over employee safety and costs. At almost every annual business meet, this issue has come up.

Rising technology renewal costs - The rapid change and obsolescence of technology is also contributing towards increased IT costs. Frequent hardware and software upgrades lead to cost overheads.

Alarming employee turnover - The Human Resource department has acknowledged that a considerable number of outgoing employees had concerns over work flexibility at Infosys and that they find flexible work options offered at other firms more attractive.

Benefits from BYOD

Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is a fast-growing trend. [5] By allowing employees to carry out enterprise work on personally chosen mobile devices, enterprises are increasingly adding flexibility to the workplace, while reducing costs. Some of the major benefits from BYOD are discussed below:

Reduced IT costs - By transferring the ownership and associated costs of a mobile device to the employees and vendors, we can reduce our IT installation and maintenance costs.

Increased employee productivity - The ability to work on a mobile device of choice provides convenience to an employee. The device can integrate better in to their lives, suiting their flexible working needs. According to a recent survey by Dell that interviewed 1,485 IT heads across the globe, 74% of companies believe that BYOD can help their employees be more productive. [6] 

Enhanced customer satisfaction - BYOD can help us reduce issue resolution times by enabling a mobile workforce. This will be especially useful for large accounts that require round-the-clock support.

Better collaboration across teams - Our Global Delivery Model will receive a major boost through more effective collaboration across geographically separated teams. The Dell survey points out that USA, India and China can benefit the most out of BYOD-enabled communications. [7] 

Lower employee turnover - The flexible work arrangements that result from a BYOD scheme can help lower employee attrition to a large extent. It must be noted that a major competitor to our India operations, IBM has relatively lower turnover figures that are generally attributed to its flexible work arrangement option. [8] 

Common concerns addressed

BYOD has three common concerns among most organizations. One is that BYOD takes control of enterprise applications and data away from the IT department. Another concern is that lack of control can compromise the security and privacy of sensitive customer data. I address both these concerns in my plan by recommending a carefully configured virtualized desktop environment. The third concern is that a flexible work arrangement may jeopardize collaborative work that requires physical presence of employees in the office. The Human Resource team can help build a sound policy around employee mobility that ensures that employees do not misuse the work-from-home feature.

The BYOD scheme overview

BYOD implementations differ across organizations. Most companies follow hybrid schemes where some sensitive roles such as finance require regular workstations while consultants and other staff members use mobile devices. Some companies allow procurement of devices through specified vendors while some merely require an employee to register a pre-owned device with the IT department. For Infosys, I recommend a hybrid approach which allows employees to purchase mobile devices from pre-determined vendors. Finance, accounting and call-center departments shall continue using workstations. The details of the scheme are discussed next.

Figure : BYOD plan overview

Source : Kriti Sharma

Planning stage

A three week workshop shall be conducted that would bring together IT heads, Human Resource executives, vendor representatives, account managers, consultants and engineers. All the stakeholders would bring unique insights and voice their concerns around the BYOD strategy. A detailed cost-benefit study would be carried out to determine the policy budget. At this stage, we will decide specifics of the long-term policy, technical implementation details and two partner vendors for BYOD.

Technical and security requirements stage

After deciding on the broader BYOD policy, we will go over the technical details of the plan. A thorough review of the technical infrastructure will be followed by a process to determine the required changes to our network. The IT teams will architect the new network and security plans. They will determine requirements for new hardware, applications, servers and bandwidth augmentation. To ensure secure communication to mobile devices, we will host virtualized desktops for all enterprise and client work. An employee would be able to remotely login using a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) channel to access enterprise applications and data using virtual instances. Fine-grained security controls shall be applied to virtual desktops that disable insecure communication, including clipboard and shared-folder features, between virtual instances and host machines. I suggest that we use VMware’s x86 virtualization infrastructure as it is the most popular and robust virtualization solution. [9] In addition, VMware has desktop virtualization solutions that, in my opinion, suit well to our IT environment.

Pilot stage

Owing to the large size of our organization, I propose that we implement BYOD in phases. The pilot stage shall be implemented for 6 months and include teams of up to 20 employees. We shall include 5000 employees across five major locations in India - Bangalore, Pune, Chandigarh, Mysore and Hyderabad. I recommend that we include a decided mix of high-mobility consulting teams as well as maintenance project teams. This will help us better interpret the relative benefits of the scheme to different types of teams and projects.

Procurement, installation and use

Employees under the policy would choose a mobile device model from one of the two chosen vendors. They shall get the virtual desktop applications and related software installed from their local Infosys IT center. Each employee would go through a week long training in the virtual desktop environment. The training would cover usage, security and policy aspects of the BYOD scheme. All enterprise activity on the VPN channel would be logged and audited.

Enterprise-wide implementation

The results from the pilot stage would be used to fine-tune the technical and policy aspects of BYOD. A company-wide policy shall be defined and documented. Process owners for various aspects of the policy would be decided. Eventually, we can add more vendors to increase choice available to the employees.

Estimated cost savings

Though it may not be currently possible to estimate the implementation cost of BYOD for the entire organization, I am introducing rough estimates of the cost savings that the solution would entail. Table 1 lists approximate costs for procuring and maintaining workstations for a small team of size 10. Useful life of our computer equipment is 2-5 years. [10] Latest workstations typically cost us between ₹ 30,000 - 40,000. [11] We would save over ₹ 1 million over 10 years for a small team. The long-term savings for the entire organization would be substantial, considering more than 150,000 workstations as per latest data. [12] 

Table : Cost savings estimation

Source: Kriti Sharma

Though overly simplistic, the above analysis demonstrates how the BYOD scheme shall eliminate the procurement costs that are an enormous amount, given the large number of workstations we maintain. Note that there will still be initial expenditure on preparing the infrastructure, training employees and maintaining the system. Currently, our IT department supports applications, services, networks and hardware. With BYOD in place, hardware support costs would be reduced as they will effectively be transferred to the vendors.

Conclusion

Through BYOD, we can enhance workforce productivity, improve customer response times, increase employee satisfaction, lower employee turnover and reduce IT costs. In the increasingly competitive environment, continual cost optimization is the best way to sustain growth and drive profits in to the future. I am positive that a carefully implemented BYOD scheme shall prove a strategic business choice for us.

I have enclosed some interesting data and statistics about successful BYOD implementations, including a Gartner report on the future outlook of BYOD. We may schedule a meeting to discuss the finer details of my proposal. I shall be excited to apply myself in a feasibility and cost-benefit analysis of the implementation. Thanks for taking the time to review my proposal. I am available at (412)304-5129 or [email protected] to assist you with any questions or concerns that you might have.

Enclosures: BYOD_survey_data.pdf, Gartner_report_BYOD.pdf, technical_diagram_draft.vsd