Towards Future IT Service Personalization: Issues in BYOD and the Personal Cloud

Introduction

Cloud services are ubiquitous today and increasingly used for a variety of purposes, including personal and professional communication, social networking, media streaming, calendar management, file storage etc. Cloud sourcing and cloud computing are not new, but in particular for non-business uses and users have existed for many years; for business users they go back to the concept of application service provisioning (ASP), cluster computing, grid computing and the like already favoured in the 1980s and 1990s. However, in recent years we have observed an evolution of private cloud services to corporate/business applications, many of which overlap business and private domains. An online calendar for example will typically integrate private and professional appointments, and the employee may want to be able to access company files through a personal device, and vice versa. This chapter studies the issues that arise from such a merge of private and professional applications on a single device, introduces the term “personal cloud” for such scenarios, and presents an approach to govern such clouds from a company perspective.

With increasing market penetration of (mobile and) smart devices such as smartphones, tablets, or laptops and owing to the ubiquitous (“always-on”) nature of these devices, meaning that they have continuous and uninterrupted Internet access, private applications such as social networks and e-mail will more and more reside on the same device as corporate documents or applications such as company spreadsheets or (interfaces to) proprietary software. Most commonly, both types of services are used interchangeably in both business and private environments, e.g., employees usually have a private and a corporate e-mail address, but both are accessed through a common interface or even using the same e-mail application. This observation is supported by the BYOD (“bring your own device”) development, also known as IT consumerization (Castro-Leon 2014), where companies are allowing their employees to use their personal devices at work or for work-related purposes (Scarfo, 2012, Disterer & Kleiner, 2013). Of the many benefits BYOD offers (both to organizations and their employees), an increase in flexibility and efficiency as well as the ability to work at anytime from anywhere are considered key (Morrow, 2012). The underlying philosophy of BYOD is in line with Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy, implemented in Facebook, that every person has only one identity (as opposed to a private and a professional one). Indeed, in an interview with David Kirkpatrick for his book, “The Facebook Effect.,” Zuckerberg is cited as saying “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (Zimmer, 2010)