BYOPC to reach mainstream in 5 years

Bring your own PC technology is expected to reach mainstream adoption within the next five years, having a transformational impact on businesses, according to Gartner.

The research firm expects there to be a surge in adoption in BYOPC technology driven by the necessity of accommodating working from home amid COVID-19 restrictions.

“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was little interest in BYOPC,” Gartner senior research director Rob Smith explained.

“At the start of the pandemic, organisations simply had no other alternative. The urgent need to enable employees to work from home and a lack of available hardware bolstered its adoption globally. Gartner clients said their adoption of BYOPC is up from less than 5% in 2019.”

As a result, CISOs and security leaders should expect the need to support BYOPC to be dependent on a long-term work-from-home strategy, he said.

IT must implement methods to limit and control access of home PCs that are often infected with malware or ransomware and fall victim to phishing attacks.

This will fuel a rise in adoption of technologies such as multi-factor authentication, cloud access security brokers, zero trust network access, virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop-as-a-service.

“Without investment in these technologies, IT faces a much higher potential cost in the form of ransomware,” Smith said.

Another technology trend expected to shake up the market is secure access service edge (SASE) technology, which allows any endpoint to access any application over any network in a protected manner.

But Gartner expects that it will take five to 10 years for mainstream adoption of the technology to take place.

“Although SASE is relatively new, the COVID-19 pandemic has fostered the need for business continuity plans that include flexible, anywhere, anytime, secure remote access, at scale, even from untrusted devices,” Gartner Distinguished Research Vice President Joe Skourpa said.

“As SASE services are cloud-native — dynamically scalable, globally accessible, multitenant and including zero trust network access, they are driving its rapid adoption. Over the last three months, SASE has been adopted by more than 40% of global remote workers.”

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