As a business owner or corporate employee, you may have already heard of this term. BYOD is getting more popular the small business industry. Either you provide your employees with the devices they need, or they obtain their own devices. In each scenario, businesses are getting more tech-savvy. In addition to bringing your own device, employees can access your cloud.
They may not be able to let work go once they get home if your employees are constantly on their phone or tablet. And you certainly want to make sure your cloud is secure. If employees use their own device, like say the iPhone, they may get distracted with their own apps like Instagram and that fighting chicken game.
So you have to ask, how advantageous is BYOD? Is more technology in the workforce better? Or is this just opening up more loopholes and distractions? What about the human to human connection?
But even with these considerations, you still have the opportunity to streamline your business practices, increase employee efficiency, and have your cake and eat it too. There are free resources out there to create your own business policy regarding BYOD. You can learn how to establish the security levels of your employees’ devices, handle business remotely and notifications, and increase self-sufficiency in you and your employees.
Be wary of data charges as well. Especially if you supplied the devices for your workforce, you have to pay for specific data plans for these instruments. There are also five assumptions to consider if you think you will include BYOD in your business:
- Don’t hire a penetration tester.
- Your employees will use their work network even when they are told not to.
- They will also value convenience more than security.
- Flash drives can be lost. Start thinking about the cloud!
- To solve and prevent security breaches, use your first resource: your employees.
Recently, Apple released an iOS security guide to help with some of these drawbacks. To ease any concern, the report says, “Many security features are enabled by default, so IT departments don’t need to perform extensive configurations. And some key features, like device encryption, are not configurable, so users cannot disable them by mistake.”
Built-in security is a plus. Are you already using this policy? What do you think about BYOD?