Best Practice BYOD Programs
What is BYOD and How Can It Bring a Company to its Knees?
Smartphones, tablets and personal laptops are just a few of the BYOD – “Bring Your Own Device” craze in full swing throughout corporate America. It is common practice for an employee to bring their high tech gadgets to work. Seems pretty harmless, right?
But consider this: Are employees using these devices to access company servers to download proprietary and sometimes confidential documents on these devices? How can your company manage the demand for accessing this information?
It may be the right time to establish a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) protocol for your company. Having IT policies in place can open up the doors to a nonstop flood of concerns, starting with the hazard of unsecured devices. And yes, the advantages are equally hard to deny. That leaves your IT personnel to handle the fallout from these policies and eliminate the ‘high-risk’ portion of their default high-risk and high-reward state.
The BYOD – Bring Your Own Device Craze Creates Risks
Here are five issues you’ll want to pay attention to moving forward with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device):
1.) Lost Devices. All the security protocols in the world won’t do any good when a person outside of your company gets control of their device. Whether it’s been lost or stolen, a device in the wild can’t be left free to spill whatever data it may contain. Lockdown procedures are extremely important with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), so make sure you have this security hazard in order.
2.) Personal Use. Draconian control of personal use is possible, if not efficient, when you’re dealing with company property. The idea becomes laughable when dealing with a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. However, if you try to keep people from using their mobile devices for their own purposes at work, or especially at home, all you’re going to do is waste a lot of effort and gain nothing in return. You need to teach and reward good security behaviors on and off the clock, because you can’t force them.
3.) Acquisition and Maintenance. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) doesn’t mean leaving employees to find their own way to shoddy products and questionable vendors. It’s in everyone’s best interest if IT offers a list of certified vendors for maintenance and procurement. Easy and reliable for the user will mean less headaches for IT and better performance of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategy across the board.
4.) Who Owns Data? There’s no true answer to this question, but discussion of this issue must be handled as early as possible. If you don’t take a firm, clear position on the subject of data ownership, problems will arise in short order. Making it easy to segregate data goes a long way in alleviating the complicated problems that arise in this arena.
5.) Hardened Devices. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) doesn’t mean employees get to take undue risks. Some industries demand a certain level of ruggedness—you don’t want an endless flood of complaints and requests because someone’s tablet froze solid or shattered on concrete floors.
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