UPDATED: November 6, 2023
BYOD is our life nowadays. With remote employees, virtual desktops, and cloud solutions rising, understanding how to implement the correct BYOD plan is paramount to your business's workflows, especially as we move into the holidays. More people will be at home, working or not, with your sensitive logins and data logged into their devices. The data is moving from office to office and now from personal device to person device, forcing BYOD to become our daily realities. But with every change comes their challenges, so how do you prepare for them?
With around 235 million people using a smartphone in the United States, it is important to have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy in place to help protect your IT infrastructure. Especially when 89% of employees say they would even take a pay cut to use a device of their choice for work purposes. Allowing employees to use their personal devices – such as cell phones, tablets and laptops – to access work-related data in the office or out in the field boosts productivity and cuts costs for businesses by not having to purchase the devices themselves. But it also opens your network up to all forms of cyber attacks.
Employees are usually more than happy to bring and use their own devices for work. Studies say that 56% of businesses with a workplace mobility strategy report higher rates of employee satisfaction. However, employees need to adhere to a BYOD policy in order for the operation to be successful. IT departments need to create material to properly train their employees on the following practices:
Employees should also be required to sign a compliance agreement upon completing BYOD training to eliminate any future questions about ownership, loss, or confidentiality breaches. Ultimately, your employees and their understanding of safety practices is you first defense against BYOD issues.
Even though employees are using their own personal devices, it is critical that they practice safe device habits to help prevent hackers from gaining access to your network and precious business data. Giving employees a clear understanding of what is expected when using their personal devices to connect to internal networks is beneficial for them and for you. Here are a few DOs and DON’Ts that will help keep personal devices and your data safe.
How many businesses have “exemptions” for upper level management? Uniform adoption of the same BYOD policy is the only way to close security holes. Likewise, lack of policy altogether puts a business at risk for data compromise. The only time an MDM strategy will work is if every employee in the entire organization adheres to the same set of regulations.
Implementing a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution allows you to manage, monitor and secure mobile devices that connect to the organization’s network. Some of the many benefits include pushing out software updates automatically, enforcing security policies, wiping data from lost or stolen devices and monitoring network activity — all from a centralized dashboard.
Ask your IT staff what policies and tools your company currently has in place and what you may need to implement to keep your employees’ devices safe and from infecting your network. If you have any questions, feel free to give us a call! We’re always willing to help and can recommend some of the solutions we have in place to protect local businesses with secure by design Managed IT Services.
Like employee training and compliance, your organization should institute the same BYOD governance policies across the organization.
Many organizations give their blessing to employees to use their phones at work without considering key inherent security risks, like:
According to one survey, 68% of healthcare data breaches happened due to the loss or theft of an employee device or file. This is an unacceptable but very real statistic.
A critical part of any BYOD policy is a strategy to remotely wipe company data from a compromised device. Select MDM technology that will give you the capability to remotely wipe any device to protect your company’s data.
Employee privacy issues are another problem with BYOD that many organizations forget to consider. Employees don't want you looking at their photos, text messages, and emails that are stored on the phones and personal devices. What's more this can get into a sticky legality issue. This is one of the hardest problems to maneuver in the BYOD world. Can I search my employees phone for information that belongs to the company? This goes back to the BYOD agreement contract...be specific!
While employees like the convenience and ease of using their own devices, they want a clear separation between their work information and their personal information. The best technology to address employee privacy issues is application-based MDM software. It gives employees the ability to access, read, and modify files on the cloud from their device. Therefore, if the company needs access to those files, management only needs to view the files stored in the cloud. They will never need to access the employee’s personal device.
Even if a business recognizes the need for Mobile Device Management (MDM), they might experience challenges in acquiring, deploying, and supporting their solution. Some IT departments are already stretched to their limit, and many cite this as a reason for delaying the implementation of a real BYOD policy.
Secondly, there are often problems with supporting employee devices. If there is no uniformity in policy and usage, how can the IT department be expected to support a myriad of devices? The problems these employees acquire may be beyond the scope of the IT department’s responsibilities. The best way to address this problem with BYOD is to get help from an IT solutions company to design and deploy your MDM solution. They can also support your employees’ devices and relieve your IT department of that burden.
BYOD can be a powerful motivator and method of promoting effective workplace mobility. However, you need a combination of BYOD governance policies and the right mobile technology to correct problems with BYOD. If you need help getting started, contact the mobility experts at Centre Technologies to learn about your MDM options today.
Enterprise mobility management offers solutions that address the biggest problems with BYOD. Learn about a workplace mobility solution that ensures the scalability and security of your mobile infrastructure, regardless of the size of your organization.