Employees are empowered by the power to choose.
Employees are especially interested in having a voice in how they communicate and collaborate using mobile communication devices. BYOD or Bring Your Own Device refers to when companies give their employees a voice by letting them choose their own mobile communications devices. BYOD also equals a challenge for CIOs as they open their internal networks to a flood of devices they don’t control.
Mobility isn’t only about communications anymore, it is also about applications. Corporate applications must be able to move across multiple mobile devices. You may have applications that must be able to move from a tablet, to a laptop, to a smartphone seamlessly while providing the same functionality and security on all platforms.
Gartner estimates that by 2014, 90% of organizations will need to support corporate applications on mobile devices, but 64% of them do not currently have a policy or security strategy in place for mobile devices.
Here are six things every CIO should know as they build their BYOD strategy.
1. Expect complexity
More mobile devices multiply the complexity of day to day tasks; including, authentication, software updates and policy changes. CIOs need a plan in place to manage the sudden growth of mobile devices in their network.
2. For employees, it’s all about the apps
Today there is an application for almost everything and CIOs building BYOD-friendly environments need to think about how to deliver both their own apps and provide access to third party apps.
3. If your corporate policy doesn’t address BYOD, it’s not a corporate policy anymore
Enterprises need to enforce the same corporate and subscriber policies whether an employee is using their own smartphone or a corporate-issued laptop. If you do not enforce a consistent policy, you risk corporate chaos.
4. Wireless use will explode after BYOD
BYOD significantly increases your wireless traffic. For CIOs this means two things: higher communications cost and lower communications quality. By using the right technology and shifting in-building wireless traffic to their local Wi-Fi network, wireless costs can actually be reduced and quality increased.
5. Synch before you act
If you adopt a BYOD policy, the integrity and reliability of your information can be corrupted with old or incorrect data. You can protect the integrity of corporate data with a solution that encourages employees to synchronize data across all devices on a regular basis, such as when a device logs in or out of the network or each time an app is launched.
6. If you feel insecure about BYOD, that’s good
You cannot rely on your existing mobile security policies for BYOD. In a BYOD world you have less control over which devices and apps are being used. The best security is one that has multiple layers of defense, such as, VPN (virtual private network) encryption, dual-factor authentication and role-defined user polices.
AdvizeX can help you build an effective BYOD policy to conquer all six of these items along with any other BYOD concerns. AdvizeX and Rolta can bring the benefits of BYOD to your business with our best-of-breed solutions and partners like HP, EMC, VMWare, Oracle, and Fortinet. ▪