BYOD is the new BYOB

Summer time is in full swing, so slather on some SPF, grab your hot dogs and don’t forget to BYOD!

It’s not a typo – more and more employees are choosing BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device,” IT policies this year. Nearly 35% of American adults currently own smartphones, and while employees plead to have their business apps on personal devices, employers are seeing increased productivity – even out of the office. Recently, mobile enterprise application platforms, or MEAPs, make working away from work even easier, by allowing companies to build cross-device, native mobile applications without coding or writing a separate app for each OS.

Plentiful Benefits and Security Scares

This summer about 75% of enterprises now have BYOD policies in place. The benefits are plentiful – working from a tablet or smartphone allows employees the freedom to work remotely. The employees get to choose the smartphone that is right for them, saving the company on training. In many cases, employees even pick up the cost of the new device while the company pays for service fees and data plans. Everyone wins! The main concern companies face with a BYOD policy is security. How can you ensure that sensitive information stays out of the wrong hands?

• Require user authentication- require a username and password for enterprise apps
• Enable remote wiping- IT can remove corporate data from a device in the event it is lost or stolen
• Keep an audit trail- maintain a record of an individual’s activity including user ID, timestamp, status information, and response time
• Require real-time only access for critically sensitive data- ensure that sensitive financial records or reports are only viewable in real-time with a live authentication
• Utilize encryption- encode data in-flight and at-rest to ensure that information being transmitted cannot be read by outsiders

What challenges and benefits do you anticipate when bringing your own device into the workplace?