Implications of the Consumerization of IT

Over the last couple of years, the phrase "consumerization of IT" has become extremely popular. It appears frequently in the trade press and analyst reports, and it's a hot topic of conversation at industry conferences. Usually, the term refers to one thing: bring your own device (BYOD) to work.

There is no doubt that the BYOD mobility movement is having a major impact on IT organizations. But the effect of IT consumerization goes far beyond just BYOD, because users are growing more comfortable with all sorts of technologies and services. It's now IT's job to account for this increased user savvy in the infrastructures and policies it designs and builds.

Evolving IT Attitudes

Until recently, most IT organizations made concerted efforts to control the types of devices that could access the corporate network. It was common for IT to refuse any user-owned devices access to the network, or to standardize on a single device, usually a Blackberry, that was allowed access. The last few years, however, have seen a dramatic shift.

Through 2010, the most common device used by a mobile worker was a PC. However, in 2011 smartphones and tablets actually outsold PCs. Because smartphones and tablets might run any of six or seven different mobile operating systems, many IT organizations have now given up traditional attempts to control which user devices can access the network.

Instead, they're learning to say "yes" to users. But, as they do so, they're having to learn how to manage and secure the various user-selected platforms in a cohesive way that integrates with their other IT and network management responsibilities and systems.

Another impact of the BYOD movement is that more users in both branch offices and headquarters facilities are accessing the corporate network via Wi-Fi. Most smart mobile devices today can support both cellular and Wi-Fi connections. While the use of Wi-Fi provides relief for the mobile WAN budget, it will stress the Wi-Fi capability of many branch-office and headquarters LANs, particularly in those organizations that originally bolted Wi-Fi onto their wired LANs to serve a niche user base. As a result, the BYOD movement is driving IT organizations to look at implementing a LAN that tightly integrates wired and wireless functionality.

There's an App for That

The consumerization of IT has caused another shift to occur slowly over the last 10 years. If you looked inside any company a decade ago, the IT organization was either regarded affectionately as technology gurus or less affectionately as technology nerds. In either case, most company employees, not seeing themselves as tech savvy, relied on the IT organization as the tech experts sitting in an ivory tower.

Today, however, it has become common for a company's employees to have both Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet access in their residences. They have email accounts from companies such as Google and Yahoo! that allow them to save a huge volume of emails. Most have devices that can print, scan and copy documents. They might also have external storage drives or over-the-air backup and storage cloud services that let them store terabytes upon terabytes of content. In other words, employees now run their own entire IT infrastructures.

On top of that, there are tens of thousands of applications that they can quickly download either free or for very little money that will tell them whatever they need to know, from the artist who recorded a song that is playing in the background to the location of the closest frozen yogurt store to their arrival gate at almost any airport.

Changing Expectations

The biggest impact of the consumerization of IT is that it has dramatically changed the expectations that a company's business and functional managers have of IT. Most business execs don't want to be told that it will take months to implement the functionality they need and are pushing IT organizations to become much more agile. If those organizations can't keep up, it's not much of a leap for managers who are culturally conditioned to downloading applications on their smartphones to simply bypass IT and make use of public cloud computing solutions.

The short-term impact of users bypassing IT is that they are likely to use applications or services with little or no consideration of the security and compliance issues associated with them. The long-term impact of users bypassing IT could well be that the IT organization becomes irrelevant.