Points worth pondering - BYOD

With the increased adoption of Tablets and smart phones, employees are willing to use their devices to access the corporate resources. Enterprise irrespective of small, medium and large started adopting MDM. Since, most of the users carry more than one device; BYOD is becoming imperative. By allowing BYOD, enterprises stand to get more benefits:
  • Cost saving on procuring the device themselves
  • Improve collaboration
  • Ensure business continuity
  • Make employees work from anywhere; increase employee productivity
While it is advantageous in many ways, it is an additional burden to their IT team in regulating the usage like strengthening their wireless network, establishing the usage policies, having expertise on different mobile OS, enforcing the policies and most of all, educating the users on these policies and regulations. Some of the most important policies and methods that enterprises adopt include:
  • Determine the device types and OS to be allowed based on the available expertise.
  • Determine what data will be allowed to be accessed from the device. If the data is exposed via enterprise-specific app, the app should authenticate the user, encrypt the data, disallow backups and other best practices to ensure data protection.
  • Security practices that should be followed like passcode policy, anti-virus applications, who can use the devices, etc.
  • Data protection policies like disallowing apps that read data from the device or any other app, app that transmits data to cloud, etc.
  • Removing the data from lost devices or when the employee leaves the company
There can be many other policies, which the company needs to analyze and adopt as per their needs. Now that the policies are in place, the next stage is to determine how to enforce these policies in BYOD. The easiest and most common way is to evaluate and deploy MDM software that helps them meet all their current requirements. The software should support the most widely used mobile OS like iOS should protect the user privacy by not accessing their private/personal data. When everything is set, it is a Win-Win situation for both enterprises and employees