Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

What Does Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) Mean?

Bring your own cloud (BYOC) is a concept/trend in which employees are allowed to use public or private third-party cloud services to perform certain job roles. BYOC often involves the piecing together of enterprise and consumer software - both in the cloud and on the premises - to get the job done.

Techopedia Explains Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

In theory, an organization may encourage freely available cloud services as an alternative to reduce capital and operational costs related to IT services, such as cloud storage, collaboration and basic productivity applications. In practice, employees are the ones driving the change as it's often simply more convenient to use existing personal accounts. The big downside is that an organization has little to no control over BYOC services, which are owned (or at least controlled) by employees and hosted by a third-party provider.

What's driving the change is the freemium model of delivery. What was licensed software is now often available as a low-cost or SaaS application. For example, Google’s email services provide a cloud storage drive as a native add-on that may be used to store, share and collaborate on documents. Another good example is employees using their own personal Dropbox account for work. This is especially common in larger organizations that don't have the budgets or staff to keep up with changes in IT. What was once an enterprise-level storage solution is now available for free or at a nominal cost. Tech-savvy employees might have been locked down from adding apps on the desktop previously can now do just about anything via a browser.