Secure BYOD in enterprises: tips for balancing risks and rewards
BYOD in today’s business
BYOD, or bring your own device is the policy of allowing employees to use their personal devices instead of or apart from corporate devices to access company information and applications. While five years ago BYOD could be considered a cutting-edge strategy, today device flexibility in business is the only way to stay efficient and successful, and in some industries it has already become a requirement, not a privilege. According to the 2015 Silicon Valley Bank report, there will be more than 1 billion employee-owned smartphones and tablets in the workplace by 2018.
BYOD creates challenges for the IT departments that have to balance security, productivity and costs. Without proper management, bring your own device may turn into bring your own disaster.
When employees access corporate data via their personal devices that can be in shared usage and always unlocked, this poses serious implications for employers that have less control over mission critical data than ever. In today’s blog post we speak about mitigating risks while introducing BYOD in enterprises, because even if you haven’t done it yet, you are highly likely to join the majority soon, and you’d better be ready for it.
Why introduce BYOD?
There are multiple advantages in BYOD, that include reduced equipment costs, increased productivity with employees always ready to participate in working chats and more satisfied with their job experience, as they are free to choose the device they prefer.
According to the recent Tech Pro research, 74% of companies have introduced the BYOD policy or are planning to do so.
70% of mobile professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018.
In the US, 90% of workers are using their personal smartphones for work purposes.
Small businesses with 50 or fewer employees allow BYOD more often than larger organizations.
Corporate network limited to office walls is the outdated way of connecting employees for the majority of businesses, and BYOD helps to stay flexible and efficient:
1. Some issues won’t wait till Monday. With BYOD, employees are not tied to the office location and their workplace.
2. You can significantly reduce costs on equipment and tech support, as there is no more need to buy corporate devices — or at least a part of them.
3. Employees are often more comfortable with working on their own devices, equipped and customized with love. This will make them more eager to solve working issues in non-working hours.
However, simply letting the employees access business data from personal devices is not the solution for enterprises with security concerns. You need to develop a clear BYOD policy or at least to provide the comprehensive instruction for your team on when and how they should communicate and share files using personal devices.
Understanding the challenges
When business-critical information is stored on the devices of employees, controlling it becomes a non-trivial task, and the risk of losing corporate files grows as they become easily reachable for unauthorized people. The Security for Business Innovation Council, a team of Global 1000 information security leaders, named lost or stolen BYODs among its top concerns. Although the missing BYODs may contain sensitive data, according to Osterman Research, it can be remotely wiped only in less than 1 in 4 cases.
When introducing BYOD, make sure that you have the tools to remotely wipe your sensitive data if a device is lost, stolen or becomes exposed in any other way.
Either way your employees use personal devices for corporate emails and calls, so you’d better know and control the way they do it as risks come along with the convenience:
40% of large data breaches were caused by lost or stolen devices;
50% of companies that allowed BYOD were breached via employee-owned devices;
60% of companies do not remove business data from their ex-employees’ devices.
The second quarter of 2016 saw a number of incidents that made the data of enterprises exposed:
- 40% of companies had missing devices;
- 27% of companies had out-of-date policies;
- only 8% of companies were enforcing OS updates;
- less than 5% of companies deployed app reputation software.
Whoever the devices belong to, the data that belongs to your company must stay safe. Enterprises with employees working remotely, either part time or permanently, should craft clear BYOD policies and instruct every team member on them.
What to keep in mind when introducing BYOD?
1. Make sure that all devices that are a part of your company network are properly maintained and have the latest patched operating systems and antivirus software.
2. Ensure that business chats and files are clearly separated from the personal data of the employees — consider keeping your data encrypted and within a secure application with strictly private access.
3. The working information of the employees should be unavailable to the people who have access to their devices.
4. Think over the emergency measures in case the employees’ devices are compromised. If the data is wiped from the device, it should be retained on the server to easily synchronize the profile on the new device.
5. Your employees need to be informed to what extent their activity is being monitored, what part of their data can be accessed by the employer and under what circumstances it can be wiped remotely. The clearly defined control boundaries will help to act accordingly in sensitive cases.
6. The employees should know, when and under what conditions they are supposed to be engaged in business conversations and activities outside their usual working hours.
7. Make sure that your employees use strong passwords and have set automatic locking on their devices after a period of inactivity.
VIPole addresses a great deal of these challenges properly and provides the necessary tools to protect and control the workflows of the enterprises. With VIPole corporate server or the team account, the employees of our clients access business chats and files from the devices they’ve chosen, and always remain secure. Security settings are configured both for the whole team and individually to meet the corporate security guidelines.
Stay safe and productive with BYOD
The goal of enterprises is to make BYOD work for both management and staff. Therefore, implementing BYOD should be cost-saving and secure for the company and comfortable for team members. VIPole meets these requirements with its cloud and on premise solutions and the flexible pricing policy.
VIPole client applications are available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Android and iOS devices, and the data, including the files, is seamlessly synced across them. Therefore, employees can switch devices easily. With VIPole, companies embed security to the core of their activities, employing the encrypted messaging application that mitigates the risks associated with BYOD.
VIPole corporate solutions provide a range of features for ensuring unified security
The best BYOD policies help to create the secure and collaborative system. With VIPole admin dashboard, it’s easy to configure the settings that will protect the personal data and the conversations of the employees on corporate and personal devices.
VIPole is likewise handy for the employees, as with a single sign in they get access to working chats, encrypted notes, tasks and files. On any device, anywhere the users stay safe and enjoy integrating private and business use on a single device. At the same time, the system owner retains control over their connections, activity and access permissions.
To make VIPole the integral part of your internal business communications you may prefer to get the application with your custom design and brand name — it is possible with VIPole white label solutions. Deal with BYOD safety, privacy and productivity concerns with the encrypted messenger that was designed with all these tasks in mind.
VIPole offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration solutions for teams and enterprises dealing with commercially or personally sensitive information, and individuals wishing to protect themselves from hackers, identity thieves and malware. More at www.vipole.com
