Three Tips for Increasing BYOD Security
Posted on June 19, 2015
By Anthony Taccone, Marketing
Bring Your Own Device, in which employees connect their own smartphones, tablets and other devices to the corporate network, has proven popular with workers. It can also be a security nightmare for CIOs, only about one-third of whom allow BYOD in their companies.
Here are four tips for protecting your company from what happens when businesses lose control of their networks and data:
- BYOD needs rules. If employees want to connect to an internal corporate network, it’s a good idea to ensure their devices meet the company’s security standards. There are a number of products – too many to list here – that can be used to make smartphones and other devices good corporate citizens.
You might also consider user rules. For example, senior executives, finance staff, coders and IT workers are more likely to be targeted by criminals and spear phishing attacks than average employees. Unless you have other security systems in place (see #4), limiting BYOD for these workers can make sense.
- Don’t store company data on the device. It’s a good idea to keep company data within company control – and that goes for BYOD, too, as well as personal cloud storage accounts. Since this can be difficult to accomplish – at least without implementing more network lock-down than your business may feel comfortable with – education is your best ally here.
- Drop the “YO.” It may make sense to drop the “your own” entirely and, instead, distribute mobile devices and related policies to workers. As an alternative, you could also offer to provide support or even a reward system for workers who keep their devices up-to-date with both hardware and security/operating system patches.
- Allow BYOD, but keep it productive and safe with a secure DaaS environment for all devices. DaaS or Desktop as a Service allows workers to use their own devices – computers, tablets, mobile phones – for work but without saving any sensitive information on the device itself. For example, Nuvestack’s virtual desktop technology provides a virtual Windows desktop; users login to that desktop to access all of their data and work as usual regardless of the device. But since no data is ever stored on user devices and communication between the device and the Nuvestack servers is encrypted, the experience makes BYOD safe.
As an added benefit, should a device be lost or stolen, with Nuvestack’s DaaS, there is no data for someone to steal. Even if someone can unlock the device, there are still multiple layers of security: Nuvestack employs a desktop password, app and other passwords – all required to access company data. And, it’s both fast and easy to cancel user accounts to avoid compromise. Using this alternative, workers have BYOD flexibility but companies are still protected against security compromises.
Incidentally, BYOD isn’t the first instance of personally owned devices on the corporate network. Early PC users – the Lotus 1-2-3 power users in the finance operation – often used either personal hardware or machines bought outside usual purchasing rules. These eventually ended up on the network and were the harbinger of the computing’s PC era.
Likewise today, BYOD is ushering in an adjustment to how companies are computing, and these devices are just the beginning of the Internet of Things (IoT) that many predict to be our future.
One last thing to note: some people are replacing BYOD with BYOT, a.k.a., “bring your own technology.”