Bring Your Own Device - Part II

Last month I blogged about a new trend in the business practices in the West - a trend to allow, or even request, their employees to bring their own mobile devices to work (laptop, smartphone, etc.) It didn't pass long before I encountered this novel approach, although in little different manifestation, in practice.

As someone who regularly goes to IT classrooms and education, I was accustomed to the typical setup of an IT classroom: a bunch of PCs arranged in rows and connected to a local network and to a classroom server, usually located in the backroom. But, recently i received an invitation to the classroom in which an organizer has specified that each attendee has to bring his own laptop!

And when you think about it, it makes a perfect sense. As I mentioned in my last blog, today majority of IT professional has their own laptop or at least can bring their official mobile device. Secondly, with advent of Cloud Computing you don't need to have dedicated Education server - you can simply lease one from several Cloud Computing providers and connect students' laptops to it through internet. And thirdly, you don't have to waste time with configuring user computers and reinstalling the PC image each time you have another group of students.

This setup is especially attractive to smaller companies that don't have dedicated classrooms and staff for conducting education. After all, the main reason why someone will choose particular education is quality of an instructor, not an exclusivity of facility. Therefore, with such dynamic setup, smaller IT companies can harness the knowledge of their experienced workers who don't work full-time as an instructors, but without spending unnecessary amount of money in maintaining their own IT Classroom.