Should your organisation COPE with the COLD?

We’ve heard the acronym BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for some time now, but less about ‘COPE’ – Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled devices; tablets, smartphones and laptops which are owned by the enterprise but used for personal purposes.

However, both BYOD and COPE have failed to ring true in highly regulated industries such as financial services (and to some extent, healthcare). For example, with the FSA stating that all phone calls which handle money transfers must be recorded, workers bringing their own smartphones into the office may simply be out of the question in certain parts of the industry. COPE may feel like a more attractive alternative, but it can also make both workers and the IT department nervous: the freedom to change functionality and install apps can often cause worries of malware and other security issues.

It may be a truism to say that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is not right for any organisation, but it’s still true. In financial services, having a device which is ‘Corporate Owned and Locked Down’ (COLD) can avoid any headaches for both staff and the enterprise itself. Staff in these industries generally understand that their phone conversations and online transactions are highly sensitive and having different devices for ‘work’ and ‘play’ can avoid a host of issues. It may feel like a throwback to the 90s, but in an age when taking a user-centric approach is necessary, sometimes organisations need to go out in the COLD.