1. JUNE 201416
#Legal
D
ue diligence oversight, from in-
ception, is crucial once an orga-
nization decides to investigate a
mobility program that enables
workers to access both corpo-
rate and personal data.
The evolving trend, over the last few years, of
providing corporate, handheld devices to desig-
nated employees to enable them to better perform
their jobs were issued with fairly strict technologi-
cal restrictions and in an atmosphere of trust. As
feature-enriched smartphones, tablets and amaz-
ingly thin & highly compact notebooks started
evolving, these same workers and workplace col-
leagues started sporting such devices for personal
use – hence, it is quite common to see folks carry-
ing a corporate-issued Blackberry together with
an Android, Windows, or iPhone device.
As organizational technology advances, accom-
panied by aging device replenishment needs work-
force divestment and remote or home office ac-
cess, more organizations began investigating and
implementing a single device strategy, wherein
restricted and controlled access would be provided
to corporate servers while also partitioning the
device for the employee’s personal use.
There is a variety of approaches ranging from
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) under which an
employee may use their own, or corporate issued
or funded, device to access both organizational
data that is ideally segregated from personal data
to COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled),
strategies under which the Corporation issues an
authorized device for corporate utilization and
also so enabled for the employee’s personal use.
The various criteria that distinguish “a wider
array of technology options beyond BYOD, such
as HYOD (Here’s Your Own Device) or CYOD
(Choose Your Own Device) BYOD programs in
terms of ownership, contracting and paying for
When
workforce
threats
get set in
motion
Mobile and cloud technologies are raising huge issues
around device and program policy. An expert’s perspective
By Lou Milrad
Lou Milrad is a Toronto-based business & IT lawyer who practices IT
Law and provides public & private sector clients with legal services
relating to technology licensing, procurement, commercialization,
cloud computing, open data and public-private alliances.

2. JUNE 201426
#Roundtable
Mobility
MaturesAt our most recent IT executive
discussion, CIOs confront a new
set of challenges in mobility.
By Jim Love
O
ver the past few years, when
we held previous roundtable
discussions to discuss mobility
challenges, many participants
were grappling with the early
stages of BYOD. The need to develop
policies, the lack of good Mobile Device
Management (MDM) solutions and the
struggle to cope with the onslaught of
IOS based phones and tablets - those
were the three major challenges.
This year, the discussion was very dif-
ferent.
A world gone mobile
Whether it's Bring Your Own Device
(BYOD) or Corporately Owned Person-
ally Enabled (COPE) the real issue is
user choice. There is little hope of stem-
ming the wide range of devices - in all
but a few companies, choice of device
is the norm. Perhaps bruised from the
futile battle to restrict IOS devices, if
our group is any indication, Canadian
companies may be actively embracing
Android devices, despite some reserva-
tions about security. Android accep-
tance - even Android preference was far
stronger than even we had anticipated.
Once referred to as “consumeriza-
tion,” the idea of BYOD was often seen
as an incursion of people’s consumer
urges dictating the type of phone. To-
day the discussion is much more from a
“producer” mentality. The idea is that
employees are driven towards a particular device
because it allows them to get their work done bet-
ter. It’s a subtle but powerful shift and it was thor-
oughly in evidence with the group who attended
our round table.
It’s not about devices. It’s about mobility. Mobil-
ity has become a standard requirement in many
corporations. When one of the participants com-
mented that he had more wireless users than
wired users, nobody batted an eye. Mobility is now
a given. And it’s not just email on a phone - that
didn’t even make it into our discussion.
Mobility as a Competitive Strategy
Today, if our group is any indication, mobility
moved to a new paradigm beyond productivity to
a new question. “How do we use mobility as part
of a competitive strategy?” Most of our partici-
pants agreed that if we want to recruit the best
and brightest these days, mobility was a key issues.
“The best talent will demand that they are con-
nected,” was the phrase used by one participant.
Jim Love is IT World Canada’s CIO