With the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablet computers, businesses and government organizations are faced with a dilemma. Should employees be allowed to use their personally owned devices for business purposes? This concept has gathered so much speed that it now has its own acronym, BYOD, for Bring Your Own Device.

At first glance this seems like a no-brainer. After all, increasing user access to business resources should also result in increased productivity, right? On top of that, giving users the option to use their own gear, with which they have greater familiarity, should also make their jobs easier.

However, the issue of support vexes those organizations that opt for BYOD. IT support staffs have for years maintained a policy of "if it didn’t come from us, we’re not going to support it." This policy has been relatively easy to defend from both a technical and a cost perspective.

Over the years, we’ve seen this policy become less important, especially with the advent of distributed computing. But until recently, virtually no organization allowed individuals to bring in their own computers, much less phones or tablets, and plug them into the corporate network.

We’ve seen a couple of approaches employed to try to support BYOD. Under the first approach, organizations publish a list of "supported devices." These lists typically include the two or three most popular smartphones and the most popular tablet. Such organizations will train their IT folks to be able to adequately support such devices within their environments. This approach can be problematic if there are a lot of users in the organization with devices that are not on the supported list.

Another approach, which can be popular with the user community, is for the organization to supply smartphones and tablets to its staff. Depending on the nature of the business, many organizations already pay for the cost of phones, so this is not too much of a stretch.

This is a nice perk for the user community and many times makes financial sense for the business. Even in tough times like we are still experiencing, many organizations already provide a wide range of benefits geared toward employee satisfaction. This benefit not only helps to keep the employees happy, but also improves their productivity. Of course, you still have that set of suspicious employees who prefer to own and use their personal devices, so this is not always a be-all, end-all solution.

Of course, the elephant in the room with respect to BYOD is security. With folks plugging their own devices into the corporate network, then taking those devices home and who knows where, how can you maintain a secure environment? The short answer is that organizations need to update their security policies to account for BYOD. Conceptually, taking data home on your tablet is no different from taking paper files or the company-issued laptop, or accessing company data via the Internet in a coffee shop. Of course, it’s not as simple as this, but that is the topic of another column.

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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 20 years of information technology experience. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.