By YAJNISH MALIK

COMPANIES typically frown on employees using PCs to do work-related chores. The obvious reasons are the risk of breach of confidentiality and data security.

But there is now a growing trend in which companies are choosing to give employees a stipend to buy their own PCs rather than providing a company-issued one. British Petroleum, Cisco, Citrix and Google are among those piloting this concept.

The concept is not new. Almost every enterprise lets employees use their mobile or smart phones in the course of their work for communications and transmitting data. Mobile devices have become essential working tools, and increasingly, there is a recognition by both employers and employees that the most effective arrangement would be for the employee to buy and use his or her own mobile devices, with the company paying for usage.

The same trend is emerging when it comes to the PC. And this trend is being fuelled by a number of cogent factors.

For starters, with more social media-savvy workers joining the workforce, it is increasingly difficult to cater to workers with 'one-size-fits-all' standard PCs. Gen Y workers are inevitably more finicky about the computers they use, and expect to tap into social networks even at work. Therefore, allowing employees to bring their own computer to work can become an effective human resource strategy.

Today's workforce is also becoming more mobile. People are working from home and on the road. Employees increasingly prefer to use the same computer for work and for personal use.

Adding fuel to the trend is the maturing of enabling technologies. One such technology is desktop virtualisation, which allows companies to easily put their corporate software into practically any end point device from a central server. In this scheme, all programs, applications, processes and data are kept and run centrally, instead of residing on the client device. Besides convenience, this scheme also offers security and data integrity that centralised storage can bring. With desktop virtualisation, even if the employee's PC is stolen, hackers cannot access the corporate data from the stolen PC.

Companies game to try out the 'bring your own computer to work' notion can also see cost benefits. Consider this: IT managers are forever trying to reduce manageability issues on end-point devices so that they can focus on managing IT infrastructure. With virtualisation, companies can decouple them- selves from employee PCs, hence reducing their total cost of PC ownership.

The so-called consumerisation of IT is a phenomenon where products and technologies are first used by consumers before making their way into the enterprise. A case in point is the increasing use of smartphones like Blackberry and iPhone by enterprise workers to access the corporate network. The availability of virtualisation and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies for enterprises to deliver IT to their employees on any device removes the need for the company to own the computing hardware.

In any case, the employee would also want to buy his own laptop for work, like his smart phone.

As the workforce becomes more mobile, and as virtualisation technologies mature and become more entrenched in enterprises, expect the 'bring your own computer to work' trend to pick up steam in the months to come.

The writer is area vice-president, Asean, Citrix Systems Inc.

This article was first published in The Business Times.