Wipro kicks off BYOD strategy for all employees

IT services major Wipro has kicked off a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy for its 1,60,000 employees as part of its vision of transforming itself into a Mobility First and Cloud First enterprise.

Wipro Chief Information Officer Raja Ukil explained the concept to Deccan Herald. “While dealing with a highly mobile, tech-savvy workforce, organisations should understand that they would want to use devices of their choice at the workplace.” According to him, in today’s interconnected world, the lines between personal and corporate digital lives are blurring, and users no longer wish to maintain separate devices for personal and official use. “Organisations, therefore, need to be able to support the BYOD trend to ensure employees are kept happy and productivity levels can be maximised. This initiative has also helped in cost savings,” he said. “This initiative will enable users to access emails, enterprise data and applications  ‘Anytime,  Anywhere  and from Any Device’,” said Ukil.

Disrupts traditional model
With BYOD, Wipro is treading new ground. “The move can potentially help organisations to improve productivity . By allowing employees to work from anywhere at any time, even though it represents a complete disruption to the traditional model of technology provisioning,”  Ukil said.

BlackBerry, a pioneer in the enterprise mobility, started integrating its phone to organisational email systems through its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) version 5 and BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) version 10 software packages, and brought in dramatic changes to the BYOD landscape. Then other hardware players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft also joined the race.

Besides re-imagining all its enterprise applications and making them mobile-friendly, Wipro has provided users with a high speed wireless network, enabling them to access useful information, collaborate on social sites, and finish transactions from any place, and any device.

Devices are secured
Ukil said Wipro is very sensitive to the fact that accessing corporate data and applications from a mobile device can also be a threat to corporate security. The company has framed its BYOD policy to ensure that only secured devices are registered. “Enterprises must build a dedicated infrastructure to support BYOD, whether this is delivered on-premise, or via cloud. Employees have to enroll their mobile devices in Wipro’s BYOD policy to secure their devices. On enrolling, the admin pushes secure email, wireless, and proxy profiles to the devices,” he said.

For securing a BYOD solution, Ukil said technology controls like Mobile Device Management (MDM), Mobile Application Management  (MAM), and Mobile Content Management (MCM) can be considered based on the type of data exposed to users.

“Other solutions required are document and content sharing, Exchange ActiveSync for email, effective authentication tools, and productivity solutions such as Microsoft Office suite,” he said. Wipro has deployed VMware’s AirWatch Mobile Device Management to make it seamless. “It enables us to address challenges associated with mobility by providing an efficient way to view and manage all devices from a central admin console,” he said.

The company allows its employees devices with iOS 7.x and above, Android 4.x and above, and Windows 8.x and above. “The company’s LoB (Line of Business) applications will be pushed to the devices through MDM. More than 20 enterprise applications have been published so far. MacBook management through MDM has also been initiated, and about 100 MacBooks have already been registered,” he said.