Promotes well being, guarantees a shorter life
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People are using personal laptops for work
AROUND ONE IN TEN of us now use our own personal notebook as our primary work PC, creating a major headache for company IT staff.
The warning comes from analyst firm Gartner, which reckons that the trend is leading to many companies cracking down on people using any personal gadgetry that needs a PC or network connection at work, with nearly half banning employee-owned devices outright and 43 per cent instituting specific policies regarding their use.
When the recession first started to bite, employees were at first encouraged to use their own kit, as a cost saving measure. But when they realised that they had limited control over these devices the IT guys started throwing their toys out their prams.
"While employee-owned notebook programmes started to appear a couple of years ago, the acceptance of such schemes by organisations varies greatly," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner.
"However, in the current climate of cost containment, large businesses are exploring all possibilities offered by alternative client computing architectures and device solution, and that includes employee-owned PCs."
As you might expect, it seems to depend quite a lot on what type of job you do as to your chances for using your own notebook for work.
Service companies, such as insurance and telecommunications companies are the most liberal but manufacturing, wholesale and government organisations tend to be a more uptight. On the other hand, perhaps if UK government employees had to use their own personal laptops at work, maybe they wouldn't misplace them so readily.
Despite the security implications, across all three surveyed countries, Gartner reckons that we're going see a growing number of employee-owned PCs in the next 12 to 18 months, thanks largely to the savings of between nine and 40 per cent when compared with company provided notebooks.
Thankfully however, companies seem to be starting to put steps in place to minimise the risks through the use of virtualised machines and tight policies.
"Growing numbers of employees are asking to use personally owned notebooks for work and an increasing proportion of companies will meet these requests through employee-owned notebook programmes, which define policies for usage, technical requirements and process for maintenance and support," added Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner.
Jump reckons that this trend is a perfect selling opportunity for vendors targeting the small and medium businesses as they have a lot of the service and support infrastructure already in place. "PC vendors cannot afford to miss the phenomenon of employee-owned notebooks and we advise them to create employee-purchase programmes that not only include hardware devices but also services and support options for users," added Jump.
After waiting 30 minutes for a ten year old work Pentium PC to boot Windows 98 we can see how the concept of a shiny new notebook you can call your own would be appealing, but the path is fraught with perils for both sides.
Issues such as privacy, data security, application management and licensing, not to mention topics such as dubious Internet browsing histories all need to be addressed if such a scheme is going to be successful. µ
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You mean you weren't already purring at "script kitty's "....
"military grade encryption"?????
Give me a break!
No such thing, use of the term just kills your post stone dead
In Sweden many teachers use their private computers for work simply because the queue to get to the school's computer is too long!
On average there are about 3.5 teachers per computer in the schools. That's tough when all of them need to print and copy different documents within one ten minute recess.
1. even good orgs dont just distribute laptops like peanuts. Finance dept staff Asst manager to higher can have laptop.
2. In IT dept the junior most staff can have better laptop than Manager in Finance.
3. Alocation of laptop is nothing more than inclusion official-worflow that this employee must work from home if required even on leave, this employee is inter dept bridge for IT needs/development. this employee has least downtime/excuses.
1. Even if its official laptop, employee still take it to home, can break its screen or whatever anywhere and still mostly get same replacement.
2. They either install cool softwares themselves or use portable apps or have friends in IT helpdesk. Despite pornographic policy i have never seen a difference/decline of porn in personal or official laptop.
3. Good orgs have policy that after 3years of use the laptop becomes property of employee. So the laptop becomes empolyee's anyway.
What bullshit you get from the corporate IT droids.
I have spent the last nearly 5 years working for a quasi-governmental body within its IT organisation. The degree of corporate clampdown is heinous and on an ascending curve; to what avail? fuck all that you would consider positive or useful. They enforce the use of old and demonstrably insecure software, they promote the use of incredibly inefficient tools that are a constant drain on time, effort and patience, they operate restrictive policies on every front, designed to impede employees' access to facilities that would in fact improve their efficiency considerably.
As the article mentions, ancient hardware running ancient software is the norm in these places and the implied assumption is always that their ITIL imprinted drones are in some way more gifted than the 20+-years-experienced user of same kit and so should be given carte blanche to overwrite ones carefully managed custom config at random while upgrading Adobe reader 4, which has now successfully exited Y2k compatibility testing.
If I had limited myself to working on their hand-cranked fossil kit, I would never have achieved anything in my time there. I chose to run my own laptop, at the excruciating cost of needing to e-mail myself back and forth via 3g in order to copy files 12 inches across the desk.
My laptop was ALWAYS running more up-to-date software, more current anti-virus, more rigorously encrypted storage than the corporate solution.
Ok I know I would not be a typical user in many respects, but companies and other organisations running IT need to be flexible enough to allow for variablity in working practices and mobile working technology in particular.
The Borg mentality is one of the dead weights holding down (or holding back) UK corporate IT.
My work don't provide any test equipment to test customers returns. Yet we are instructed to lower Returns!
So I take in my own netbook, media player and various cables to allow customers to test their often fault-less devices.
If the IT industry really understood how clueless the general public is on modern technology they'd get a real fright.
I must have saved 3 customers lives in the last month as they try to kill themselves by wiring Mains to a battery powered device.
I should get a bloody medal!
There is a company called MarketStor, Corp. (www.marketstor.com) that has a security software designed specifically for laptops and PC's. We have tried various other backup and security softwares including Asegria, but they all seem to be just server software's that have patches in them to work on smaller machines. None of them really worked very well and were very expensive. So we gave the SecureStor a try and it works perfectly for our sales reps who use laptops in the field. The Administrator (me) has the choice of rolling out policy's or letting the sales guys decide (no brainer here!). So I check a few boxes and every time we have a new guy start and connect his laptop to our network it automatically rolls out my policies. I force backup of everything (it does the initial full backup and then only backs up the changes), and it is all military grade encryption even during De Duplication process (no script kitty's can steal anything during unencrypt phase because there is no unencrypt phase!), and I set a predetermined time to start an automatic delete of any sensitive material. So if the laptop is stolen the sensitive material is wiped if the laptop does not log into our systems in the time I specify. If it does, then we use the trace feature to track it down, then I send out a command to immediately wipe the important data anyways. It's a perfect solution for the whole "laptops in the workforce" type dilemma.
Would reduce overhead by such a great amount. The technology hasn't matured vastly yet, but it does a pretty damn good job. Subsidize employee broadband and you're still saving money. Eliminate sick days... come on people, it's nearly 2010.