More enterprise organizations every day face the question of how to deal with the large and growing presence of consumer devices users bring to work. This “consumerization of IT” is both a logical and irreversible trend that stems from technology advances in consumer hardware, ubiquitous information access, and the blurring of the lines between work and personal lives. Microsoft believes organizations should embrace this trend, and provides products and technologies to help support today’s modern workstyles.

This paper provides a brief overview of how the consumerization trend has accelerated over the past several years and how that trend is both spurring and supporting the more flexible, modern workstyles preferred by today’s users. This paper looks at the benefits and challenges of consumerization, including the need for IT departments to consider a more user-centric approach to client management instead of an outdated device-centric approach. The paper also provides details on how Microsoft solutions can help IT departments support flexible workstyles by optimizing the application infrastructure, providing unified management, and supporting modern security and access models.