Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, used to be thought of as a win-win. Employees could use phones they were used to, while businesses could avoid spending thousands of dollars on new hardware. While BYOD is convenient and solves multiple problems for your business, it’s crucial that you also remember the inconvenient truth: that BYOD is insecure unless you take action to secure it.
Here are the security considerations and potential ramifications for failing to secure your BYOD devices (as well as a solution that can address most of them).
You Cannot Secure What You Don’t Own (Or Can You?)
When you own your devices, you can enforce strict security protocols like mandatory encryption, jailbreak detection, and scheduled updates, but these boundaries are gone when you use BYOD.
You can’t force an employee to update their personal operating system, and an unpatched phone could be wide open to threats. Furthermore, personal phones are full of third-party apps, many of which could be granted aggressive data-scraping permissions. These apps live on the same device as confidential client emails, proprietary data, and other sensitive information.
And if IT tries to lock down a personal device, employees complain about privacy. This usually results in a watered-down security policy that protects no one—especially not your business.
The Offboarding Nightmare
If one of your top salespeople left your business to join a competitor, you’d better hope they don’t have any company data on their device.
This happens all too often in business, where an employee ends up using their phone for work purposes, only to accidentally take proprietary information off-premises at the end of the workday or their tenure with your company. You can remotely wipe work apps, but if the employee hasn’t synced their data correctly, they might still have fragments of data left on their device, or in their personal galleries. Of course, wiping a personal device is tricky in and of itself, and it can lead to real lawsuits that are rarely worth the effort.
And if you’re shelling out money in a lawsuit, you might as well have purchased a fleet of company phones.
Mixing Personal and Professional Contexts
Human error can create all kinds of problems for your business—including data breaches from something as simple as a copy-paste job.
Think about how easy it is to copy a sensitive password or client detail from a work app, then send it to someone on accident through a different app, all because it was on your clipboard. This happens more often than you might think. Now imagine if your toddler was playing a game on your phone and accidentally deleted data or, worse, sent that data to a friend. It’s a data breach all the same.
You need a way to keep these issues from sinking your business, because it’s only a matter of time until they do.
Many of the risks associated with BYOD can be resolved through smart implementation of mobile device management and mobile app management. These solutions let you manage, lock down, and selectively wipe only work apps and work profiles in the event of a data incident or employee turnover.
To get started with MDM, MAM, or BYOD today, call Business Solutions & Software Group at (954) 575-3992.
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