With more than 1.5 million Android apps and over 1.4 million iOS apps for users to choose from, IT departments at BYOD organizations face an impossible support task. Yet the old days of curtailing employee choice and standardizing on one software program for each function costs companies top employees, weakens productivity, and ultimately is no longer an option for most businesses.

One answer lies in compromise, in developing multiple IT-approved choices that allow employees to pick their favorite app and don’t overly stretch IT’s support resources or endanger infrastructure or data due to the use of risky, potentially dangerous third-party applications. By 2017, one-fourth of large companies will have an enterprise application store in place, Gartner estimated in 2013. Given the multiple benefits, the number should be larger.

Baskets of Benefits

When Australian engineering and professional services company GHD removed user administration rights from employees’ machines it placed a heavy burden on IT, although it stopped the surge of headaches users had generated by adding their own apps to workstations, CIO Elizabeth Harper told Enterprise Technology. The company wanted to satisfy both IT and end users, and researched a new software asset management (SAM) tool as part of the solution, she said.

SOURCE: flexerasoftware.com