Bring Your Own Device – Casserly Consulting

Are You Prepared for Employees to Bring Their Own Devices?

Bring Your Own Device policies have helped many companies save money on technology by allowing employees to use their own devices, rather than taking on the cost of providing devices. However, as much as a BYOD approach can help a business financially, there are some potential drawbacks to adopting one that you should be prepared to deal with.

Managing These Mobile Devices
Whenever there is a Bring Your Own Device strategy enacted, there needs to be Mobile Device Management in action as well. Your MDM software also needs to be monitored, as this will inform you if someone without the proper authorization is accessing data that they shouldn’t be.

However, sufficient monitoring is a time-intensive task. It is even possible that it would require you to add an additional employee to properly make use of your MDM software. Before you commit to these measures, which are a must for successfully implementing BYOD, make sure you have (or can obtain) the resources to run them.

One great solution to mitigate your organization’s overall BYOD costs is the built-in automation that many of today’s Mobile Device Management platforms offer. This automation can be customized and run to allow your technicians to focus on the core aspects of your business’ technology rather than spend all of their time, and your money, monitoring employee smartphones.

Streamlining For Support
A major advantage to providing employees with work devices is the control you have over the devices you provide. By selecting a specific model for your employees to use, you can standardize your systems that much more, and make your IT administrator’s job that much easier. By reducing the variety of devices they need to be familiar with, IT can service them more quickly and effectively.

This can be a drawback to BYOD, as it makes support a more arduous task and–as a result–more costly. With a variety of devices and their specific issues, it becomes a more time-intensive task to identify and resolve any problems. Taking this into account, it may be a more cost-effective option to invest in standardized mobile devices for your company to use, rather than try to manage the variety of devices your workforce likely uses based on personal preference. This is a variable that you will need to consider based on your specific circumstances and abilities. Do you finance devices for your staff? Or, manage the varying devices your staff will bring?

Leaving Yourself Vulnerable
Not all devices are equally suited for use in a BYOD strategy–sometimes, a new feature can lead to a pretty severe vulnerability. Take, for example, any device with iOS 11 installed. Despite having switches in its control center to activate and deactivate Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, these switches don’t actually deactivate their connection. This leaves these devices vulnerable, and if they were a part of a BYOD implementation, your business becomes vulnerable, as well.

Wasted Resources
Often, the question isn’t if BYOD makes sense, it’s if BYOD makes sense for a particular employee to have access to. Some companies will reimburse their staff for the personal data that they use. However, if an employee’s responsibilities don’t really require the use of a mobile device, having them involved in a BYOD strategy is akin to paying for their personal use of the device; and, can hinder their overall productivity.

Don’t get us wrong–BYOD can be a great benefit to your business and its bottom line. You just shouldn’t dive in without considering the potential downsides and planning how you will go about solving these problems. The IT professionals at COMPANYNAME can help. To learn more, call us today at PHONENUMBER.

Tip of the Week: Every Mobile Device Policy Needs to Cover These 3 Areas

Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other mobile technology are practically necessities in today’s modern workplace; especially if you want to keep productivity flowing at all times. However, implementing mobile devices into your workplace infrastructure is more complicated than it sounds, especially if you want to preserve security. Here are three topics to consider when implementing mobile devices in the workplace.

Data Security
One of the key concerns that any business using mobile devices needs to account for is security. When you add new devices to your business’s network, you’re adding endpoints that could potentially fall victim to hacking attacks. The more devices that are connected to a network, the more patches and updates that need to be installed in order to maintain security. Basically, adding new devices means more work, and more work can lead to cut corners, which inevitably leads to compromised devices.

A mobile device management solution is capable of securing all of your organization’s devices, be they smartphones or laptops. It’s the easiest way to manage access to mission-critical data, whitelist and blacklist apps, and remotely wipe devices that have been compromised.

Connectivity
When you’re taking mobile devices out of the office, you need to consider how your employees (and yourself) are going to connect to sensitive corporate data. While you could just connect to your cloud solution through a public Wi-Fi connection, this is discouraged, as public Wi-Fi can often be compromised. You never know who else could be on the network, watching your every move.

In instances like these, a virtual private network (VPN) is a valuable tool. With a VPN, you can access your network’s data over an encrypted connection, meaning that as long as you are connected to a wireless network, the data sent to and from your device will be secured so that any onlookers won’t be able to do anything with your data. The data sent to your device is encrypted and then decrypted upon arrival, so if any hackers try to steal it in transit, they’ll only get a jumbled batch of letters and numbers.

Cloud Access
Of course, you’ll need access to your organization’s data, especially when you’re out of the office and using several different devices. To do so, you need a cloud solution that allows your business to share and collaborate on files in real time, across multiple platforms. Most importantly, you want to ensure that your team can open crucial data that’s needed to keep operations moving forward, even when out of the office. A dynamic cloud solution–either public, private, or hybrid–is the key to solving this pain point. Depending on your business’s specific needs, you’ll want one that prioritizes the functionality and security your business requires.

For all of your business’s mobile device security needs, you can contact COMPANYNAME. We’ll work with you to ensure that your devices aren’t putting your business’s data at risk. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.