BYOD ? Good For Business? Or Security Nightmare? | Aragonite ...

BYOD, (Bring Your Own Device), is a phrase that has been adopted to refer to employees who bring their own computing devices to the workplace, (smartphones, laptops, tablets, PDA?s).? This is an emerging trend in the workplace, which is being embraced in many corporate environments.? I recall for many years of my IT career, just thinking of allowing someone to bring their own device and plug it into your corporate network was enough to get you laughed out of the building.? The main reason being security, since these are personal devices, IT would be unable to enforce the strict security standards necessary to ensure the companies network was secure.

Recently Trend Micro commissioned a study on the growing Mobile Consumerization Trends & Perceptions.? Of the more than 400 IT professionals who responded, 78% said that their company supports employee owned devices accessing the corporate network and data.? Those figures are in line with other studies that show BYOD is the new normal among most U.S. companies.

Alarmingly, approximately half, of companies that indicate they support BYOD have experienced a security breach as a direct result of an employee-owned device accessing the corporate network.? A large number of the companies, but not all, that experienced breaches introduced new standards to prevent future occurrence.

Approximately half of the companies that experienced a security breach responded by putting access restrictions on the resources and data that users could access from mobile devices, while about 42% installed security tools on the employee owned devices.? 12% of companies responded to the security breach by terminating there BYOD programs.

The numbers suggest that many companies are not instituting sufficient security measures when adopting BYOD programs, even if mobile device management systems are in place.? They also suggest that many companies are not taking the steps necessary to prevent the breaches even after having experienced one.? Those are disturbing implications for companies and employee, customer, or client data that they collect or have access to.

There are also some positive findings in the report:

• Nearly all companies (89.1%) have security and acceptable use policies around personal devices that access a company network
• Most (80%) require some form of mobile security or management agent be installed on employee devices
• A little over half (53.7%) restrict BYOD to specific platforms, mobile OS versions, or specific devices
• Almost three-quarters (72.5%) plan to implement a solution the separates business and personal data on employee devices like the encrypted container approaches offered by Good and Bitzer Mobile.
• Most companies have a remote wipe policy in place ? 35.7% wipe devices when they are lost/stolen and when an employee leaves the company, 25.3% wipe lost/stolen devices but don?t wipe when an employee leaves

Source: http://blog.aragonitetechnologies.com/?p=278

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