India Gadget Reviews

Security Concerns in BYOD

The technological boom has affected every industry and business with the introduction of new concepts and methodologies. Methods which aim at improving the productivity of a company and keep its workforce engaged in their assigned operations.

Various concepts like Enterprise mobility, bring your own device or BYOD were introduced to facilitate the workforce to work outside the boundaries of organization while staying connected with the LAN of the company. However, there is always a threat associated with this technique and can cause a great loss to a business if its policies are compromised in anyway. So in the case of the concept of BYOD, a number of security concerns can arise making it become a bottleneck rather than a facility for the business to easily accept.

Some of the security concerns with the concept of BYOD in businesses are:

Loss of device: Mobile devices are lost or stolen each day due to lack of attention on the owner's part. However, after deploying such a device for the corporate purpose the possession of device in the right hands become crucial. Since the device is now indulged in storing and exchanging the confidential information related to a business, the loss of device could be a major threat for the organization.
Personal & professional use: Since the concept of BYOD allows employees to include their personal device into their working practice, the device is used for multiple purposes. Device dedication for more than one operation deviates its purpose. Not only this, the mixing of data may become unmanageable for the user & also, various other operations like updating the application, which may require the custody of the device, could be objectionable to user.
Licensing issues: IT staff needs to have enough licenses to support the application in each device. Since the device is a part of an enterprise it is not expected to have cracked or duplicated software and creates a suspicion on the credibility of the organization and eventually its reputation.
Corporate policies: Organizations may not leave the confidential data in the access of anybody in the workforce, rather it needs to define the level of access according to the authority. In order to do this, various policies each at hardware and application level need to be applied which may make a user uncomfortable because he himself cannot have absolute access of his own device.
Application compatibility: Not all the devices which owned by the workforce are compatible with enterprise applications. Also, it is not possible to test and certify the application to be deployed at each level of mobile device separately. An application should be generic in nature if it is needed to be deployed on a large number of platform.

However, in order to justify the use of BYOD concept successfully correct action plan or strategy should be designed before deploying. Frequent data assessment should be performed in order to know who, when and from where accessed the data and what information was accessed. Virtual workstations should be provided in situations where the limit to keep a synch with the device with the LAN reaches its peak.

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for various iPhone application development companies like Q3 technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Mobile Software Development.