Managed services providers (MSPs) looking to leverage their expertise in bring your own device (BYOD) may want to take a look at another way to approach the topic by examining applications strategy.

This blueprint for BYOD is being pushed by Gartner, Inc. (IT).

"BYOD is not just a purchasing policy and needs to be approached more broadly with the applications and strategies designed for today's world," the IT research firm said.

According to one analyst, "setting usage policies or having strategic sourcing plans that mandate a particular platform" is not the same as "designing your applications to meet the demands of BYOD."

"BYOD should be a design principle that provides you with a vendor neutral applications portfolio and a flexible future-proof architecture," Gartner Research Director Darryl Carlton said in a prepared statement. "If the applications exhibit technical constraints that limit choice and limit deployment, then the purchasing policy is irrelevant."

Gartner's reasoning? A diverse workforce means an expansion of the BYOD community. "The community of users has expanded to include suppliers, customers, employees and a very broad range of stakeholders," Carlton noted. "We are no longer developing applications for deployment to an exclusive user base over which we exert standards and control."

To respond to these changes, Gartner suggested that "applications within the business now need to support a diverse and demanding community of users both within and outside of the organization" to accompany increasing demands.

"For CIOs to consider BYOD activities within their organization to be a temporary problem generated by a few disaffected employees would be a tragic mistake," Carlton said.

The IT research firm added that businesses will need to come to terms with the fact that users outside of an organization's internal workforce will happen.