The Best Way to Start Working with BYOD

Bring Your Own Device, better known as BYOD, is the act of workers using their own personal devices for work-related tasks and purposes. While many companies see BYOD as a valuable asset that can net them plenty of overtime hours, others see it as a security risk. They’re not wrong; a lax BYOD policy can be problematic if left unchecked. Therefore, knowing how to approach BYOD is the key to unlocking its true potential.

What’s the BYOD Advantage?
Jumping into BYOD head-first can lead to potential mistakes and security breaches, especially if you haven’t done your due diligence and put policies into place. Therefore, it’s important to consider why you feel BYOD is a necessity for your business. A BYOD policy means that your employees will be bringing devices with games and other distracting applications to the office. If you’re concerned that your team will be too distracted, you need to be prepared to handle this issue. Similarly, the Internet of Things opens up more possibilities for obscure Internet-connected devices to make it through your policy, which can quickly lead to a security discrepancies.

On the plus side, however, there’s plenty to gain from allowing workers to bring their own devices to work. Since your team will have access to employee data from their own devices, they might feel like it’s finally worth it to check their email, respond to clients, and maybe even do some work at their leisure. This means they can get ahead and accomplish more while in the office. Furthermore, some employees will find that they prefer their own devices to those offered by the organization, like a company-provided workstation, allowing them to work harder and more efficiently. Even small choices like those associated with BYOD can be enough to boost employee morale.

Put Solid Rules in Place
A BYOD policy is essentially a plan that’s used to optimize and control the use personal devices in the workplace. As you might imagine, it’s not always easy to integrate such a policy if you’ve never done so before. This kind of project needs a dedicated manager who can think of each possibility thoroughly before implementation. The trusted IT professionals at Computerware can help you consider all possibilities before you put your BYOD strategy into place.

To this end, one general tip that you’ll want to keep in mind is to use very specific guidelines to identify what your team can and can’t do for work with their mobile devices. These rules should be company-wide with no exceptions. This way, any employee can know what the regulations are and whether or not they’re compliant.

Computerware’s Mobile Device Management
When integrating a new BYOD policy, you might use a lot of time and resources. This is why Computerware offers our own mobile device management solution. We know you don’t have time to waste on mobile device management. After all, you have a business to run. Instead of worrying about it, our solution performs the following functions:

• Limits network access to secured wireless devices. With a BYOD policy, you’ll have a lot of new devices attempting to access your network. It’s important that only devices which have been approved can access your network. Otherwise, you might be opening up your network to a whole new host of threats.
• Whitelists and blacklists applications. Certain applications request data from the mobile device which accesses them. Many users will download a new application and immediately install it, ignoring the window which reveals what personal information the app pulls from your device. We can limit the information which is shared with applications by whitelisting and blacklisting them.
• Remotely wipes misplaced devices. Devices that hold sensitive corporate data could accidentally fall into the wrong hands, be it a competitor or a hacker. It’s your job as the business owner to make sure you’re ready to deal with this regrettable situation. Setting up remote device wiping is a good way to ensure that your private data stays private, even when it’s misplaced.

If your business is sick of beating around the bush, and you want to dive into BYOD, give Computerware a call at (703) 821-8200. We’ll help you formulate a plan to move forward with your mobile device strategy.