Discussion on:

Test BYOD in your organization with employee tablets

wouldn't even allow the majority of us to bring our cellphones to our work area,
how would you convince them to allow a personally owned tablet, netbook, or smartphone onto their network?
This article is just another in a string of blogs attempting to find some way to shoehorn
a tablet into the workplace. Maybe in the future, 5 to 10 years away, but not in
the near future.
Something quite a number of proponents of BYOD fail to acknowledge...many
companies will depreciate the cost of new equipment for tax purposes. If they go
with BYOD, that tax write-off is gone.

"The counterarguments invoke the usual suspects of any large-scale change in corporate technology infrastructure: security and management. ... your staff likely already has several tablet-toting individuals, ..."

You forgot a couple. One, with today's economy, many people can't afford a new primary computer, much less a secondary device. I don't think anyone on our IT staff has a personally owned tablet, although there are a few e-readers. Two, you're assuming the workplace has the majority of its applications already available as web apps, not still primarily using locally installed programs.

"Theres a near 100% chance that employees in your company (and IT in particular) are already bringing tablet devices to work and potentially connecting them to your network and company resources. "

Maybe a large percentage of TR members work at locations where they're regularly requested to support connectivity to personal devices. I'd love to see a poll asking about it. I'm only asked once every couple of years, and I'll 100% guaran-damn-tee no one in this facility is using a non-company device on the company network. Me, I try to keep my workplace and personal computing activities and hardware separate.

I have to agree that most companies have personal devices in use. While they may not be supported. the employees are using them. Even if they cannot connect to the corporate network, they are using them anyway.

It used to be easy to keep personal devices off the network. Employees are getting more technical all the time and they are figuring out ways to get their devices connected. Even if they can't get on the corporate network, they are using 3G or 4G at work.

It was also easy to keep those devices away from work when they were much larger and heavier. When laptops were 10 pounds, nobody wanted to carry two of them (one work laptop and one personal laptop). Now with devices as small and light as they are, people will carry them in their bag with their corporate device(s).

To make a policy that no employee owned devices can be used in the workplace would result in an employee satisfaction issue. It makes more sense to define what personal devices can and cannot be used for. For instance, why not let an employee use their iPad to take notes in meetings and access email via OWA? You can agrue that those meeting notes are company property, but if they write them down in a paper oraganizer that they purchased you have the same issue. Do you ban employees from using their own paper organizers? Years ago people used to print their calendars and contacts and put them in their organizers. If they left the company, that data went with them. If they lost their organizer, anyone that found it had access to that information. At least if they use a tablet for the same data, it should have a lock code to access it.

"If they left the company, that data went with them"

The companies understood this long time ago. There are solutions for capturing as much information from the employees, including the information kept in their heads.
For many savvy organizations, capturing the information from the employees became a high-priority necessity.
As of employees with enough technical knowledge to connect their owned devices to the company's network, I invite them to try this in my wired and/or wireless networks.

It's possible to both address security concerns and implement BYOD. What's needed is to separate the Enterprise apps and data from the personal devices. This can be achieved with a solution like Ericom's AccessNow, a pure HTML5 RDP client that enables remote users to securely connect from various devices (including iPads, iPhones, Android devices and Chromebooks) to any RDP host, including Terminal Server (RDS Session Host), physical desktops or VDI virtual desktops and run their applications and desktops in a browser. This keeps the organization's applications and data separate from the employee's personal device. All that's needed is a HTML5 browser. No plug-ins or anything else required on the user device.

AccessNow also provides an optional Secure Gateway component enabling external users to securely connect to internal resources using AccessNow, without requiring a VPN.

For more info, and to download a demo, visit:
http://www.ericom.com/html5_rdp_client.asp?URL_ID=708

That's all that's needed at the client end. I notice you assume some sort of remote application server is already in place, and don't mention how much new infrastructure would be needed on the back end if not already there..