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Bring Your Own Device
"BYOD" policy is on every IT manager's radar, but is it mainly a strategy to boost employee productivity, or a security breach waiting to happen?
BYOD describes a growing trend where employees are allowed to bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work, and use them to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers and databases, as well as their own personal applications and data.
Understanding cloud based services can help IT managers and Service Providers answer the key question they face concerning BYOD: how do we facilitate more flexible, efficient IT services, without compromising on security or usability?
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Data Breach
The risk of data breaches on personal devices is every bit as real as on company issued devices. If an employee uses a smartphone to access the company network and then loses that phone, the confidential data stored on the phone could potentially be retrieved by untrusted parties.
Control & Access
Controlling how Bring Your Own Devices access Private or Corporate Networks, and how to ensure this is enabled securely, is another added layer of complexity that needs to be carefully thought through.
Compliance
Businesses that need to ensure compliance such as PCI or HIPAA may find defining and enforcing an acceptable use policy under BYOD difficult for devices which are not owned and (completely) managed by the company.
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Morale/Productivity
Under BYOD, employees choose which technology or device they wish to use for work, rather than having it dictated to them as part of company policy. This can improve morale and productivity by empowering staff to work according to their own preferences – including the ability to choose applications which might not necessarily be made available by their enterprise.
Reduced Data Leakage
Employees can minimise the risk of inadvertent data loss by protecting their devices using a device-locking password. Companies should also have policies in place that enable the remote wiping of a device, should it be mislaid.
Data is Encrypted
BYOD can be secure. The use of a secure wireless protocol for all Network access – most commonly WPA2-Enterprise which is the only wireless protection standard that provides all three primary forms of wireless security – should be standard procedure.
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Trends in Mobile Device Adoption
- 67 million – the number of tablets Apple have sold since the launch of the first iPad in April 2010
(the tech giant shipped 15 million iPads in Q1 2012 alone) [Forbes.com]
- 24 years – the time it took for Apple to sell the same number of Macs [Forbes.com]
- 7.4 billion – the number of 802.11n devices there will be by 2015 [ABIResearch]
- 1.2 billion – the number of smartphones entering the market between 2012 and 2017 [ABIResearch]
- 50% per year – the rate at which Enterprise tablet adoption will grow [Vertic Agency]
- 4-to-1 – the ratio at which Mobile application projects will outstrip native PC projects by 2015 [Vertic Agency]
- 67 million – the number of tablets Apple have sold since the launch of the first iPad in April 2010
