Which is a better strategy for managing mobile devices? BYOD(Bring your own devices) vs. COPE (Corporate owned personally enabled)

In the month of Oct 2014, HP announced the decision of splitting the company into two. The news came from the global PC maker as a strategic decision to focus more on enterprise business which is expected to make future in roads. The split will enable two separate business divisions with HP Inc. primarily focusing on personal computers and printers and HP Enterprise Systems focusing on servers, storage, networking, converged systems, software and services. The rapid slowdown in the sales of personal computing devices like desktops and laptops was one of the key drivers for HP's decision to split. Enterprises have started to encourage their employees to bring their own devices to work which has led to humongous growth in the mobility devices segment. The growth in the mobile device market is evident with the tablet and smart phone sales increasing 60% and 70% respectively compared to the previous financial year, thereby declining the PC market by 11% year on year. Though the idea of BYOD has started to flourish in a lot of large enterprises, the manageability of devices has proved to be of a greater concern especially when comes to IT security. Enterprises in the European regions still have very less BYOD adoption initiatives due to the strict IT governance guidelines in place; this is when organizations started to innovate the BYOD policy by tweaking the concept of an employee bringing the device of his own to an employee operating a single device for both his professional and personal use owned by the organization and named it COPE (Corporate owned and personally enabled) Introduction According to a recent study it was found that 70% of the employees use their personal devices in the workplace and more than 20% of the employees do it without the knowledge of the IT department. This is when the concept of BYOD kicked in among large enterprises, where the organization allows the employee to bring any device of his choice and use it for official purposes. The model was a game changer in terms of reducing the capital expenditure involved in buying devices, reducing operational expenditure due to reduced maintenance and increased employee productivity. Author: Sudharsan.R