Is it Safe to Use BYOD?

Smartphone’s Use to Boom in Coming Days

Smartphone Mobile Devices use is increasing rapidly. According to Cisco survey the growth rate is nearly tripled in 2011. By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, and by 2016 there will be an estimated 1.4 mobile devices per person.

The rise of smartphones, is not surprising as more and more people rely on their mobile devices for their daily activities, including business communications, when at work, at home, and on the road. They access their corporate network from their personal mobile device and leverage many features like email, enterprise VPN connections, mobile business applications, spreadsheets, documents or presentations, many more for their day to day activities.

Is It Safe to Use BYOD?

With mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets becoming an integral part of day-to-day activities, many companies have decided to allow employees to choose mobile devices to use them in their workplace to connect to the corporate network and execute their business activities. A comprehensive device-agnostic BYOD strategy wherein the security is integrated in to the design can simplify and strengthen security o f networks, data and applications.

 According to a recently survey by Eset found that 81% of the US adults use a personal electronic device for work-related functions.  IPass in a recent survey has revealed that employees who uses personal devices to work has contributed to more than 240 hours of extra work than those who have separate machines for work and home.

In adopting BYOD into their enterprise businesses, Enterprises realize to achieve:

Consumerization:  Consumerization of infrastructure, applications and technologies that can dramatically lower cost and increase business functionality for enterprises and for employees it helps to use the device at ease because of the familiarity of devices or applications installed in the device.

Increase Efficiency and Productivity: These days most employees are carrying their own personal devices, notebooks, mobile phones and tablets that are latest. So they get to perform their tasks with acquainted, highly effective and latest technical devices that help to get their task done easily their tasks anytime anywhere.

Flexibility:  With today’s more mobile workforce, providing the information wherever they work for the day happens to be not an expectation but a necessity for business success.

Decreased Corporate Expenses: Enterprises are not required to do IT provisioning and no purchasing or renting of devices.

Employee Satisfaction: The workforce is reduced from the pressure of carrying two devices and can use the mobile device of their own choice.

Personalization: Employees feel comfortable working with their own devices at work, since they are used to the functions of the system.

Improve License and Software Management: The enterprises benefit out of the centralizing the packaging, distribution, provision and management of software licenses for all company owned applications employed through VDI are reduced.

Challenges in Adopting BYOD:

While the enterprises enjoy numerous benefits in adopting BYOD concepts, it has numerous risks associated:

Providing Device Choice and Support: With BYOD, the devices are evolving so rapidly and it becomes impractical for the IT organizations to provide the choice and same level of support to the different brands of mobile devices the employees bring to workplace.

Visibility of Devices on the Network: With BYOD adoption, each employee is likely to bring one or more devices and be connected to the network through different modes. It is critical for the IT to have tools to monitor the different devices connected to the network.

Protecting Data and Loss Prevention: Protection of corporate data is the biggest challenge of BYOD implementation.  An employee-owned smartphone or tablet may be regularly used to access personal data and business application.  This may require a secure business partition to securely contain the corporate data and also require a VDI application to authenticate passwords without storing them on the device.

Work and Personal Overlap: With BYOD, the corporate and personal data are increasingly co-mingled on devices, leading to security and privacy challenges.

Virus Attack: If users bring their own devices, it becomes very difficult to monitor various devices. Some devices may transmit viruses and damage the network and other devices linked to the network.

Expensive for Employee: It is an out-of-pocket expenditure for the employee and they would be responsible for repairs if the device was damaged or spoiled while performing the task.

Data Loss – BIG RISK: The risk that sensitive data could be placed on employee’s devices and lost can be a significant challenge for organizations.

What Enterprises Need to Do to Mitigate these BYOD & Mobility Risks?  

To tackle these challenges, the enterprises need an effective Mobile Device Management solution for protecting vital company data and other assets.

 Whether employees use company-sanctioned mobility platforms and devices or use their own personal mobile devices, mobile device management is crucial. Organizations that have not developed an MDM strategy until now will need to do so as soon as possible to decrease the threats of data security breaches, as well as loss of confidential information.  Creating an effective MDM technique that covers both the mobile devices that companies purchase and/or those owned by the employees themselves typically begins with an assessment of danger tolerance. With an acceptable level of danger recognized, IT then needs to evaluate the various strategies available for implementing MDM solutions. These techniques include software solutions, applications and cloud-based offerings.

An effective Mobile Device Management solution should provide the enterprises with real management capabilities, including convenient configuration, policy governance, user, Mobile apps and device administration, security, privacy protection, self-service tools and lost device management.