I got a very interesting question in my inbox today:
Hello IT Nerd. I am a IT manager and my boss was to have a BYOD policy as he thinks it will give users choice in terms of the mobile devices that they want to use and save us money on hardware as we won’t be paying for it. I don’t think this is a good idea, but I would like to know what your thoughts are.
Thank you.
Thanks for the question. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies do have some risk to them, but if done right you could make it work well for you.
Here’s two main reasons why attempts at implementing a BYOD policy have crashed and burned:
- Users don’t want to pay for their own devices so that you as an employer can have better access to them. If you want access to your employees after hours, they think you should pay for it or for the cellular data usage.
- If you buy your own devices, you can lock them down and restrict what users can do. When you let users buy their own devices, you get devices aren’t completely under your control on your network. That opens up your company to some degree of risk. For example, your users could have devices that are compromised in some way such as having malware on it. That’s not going to save you money as the users are going to make you deal with it.
Now, here’s why it may work for you:
- Whether you know it or not, your employees may use less secure workarounds such as Google Drive, Box, or DropBox to share company files with other individuals or themselves. That will put your company at risk as your data is completely outside your control.. A properly implemented BYOD policy can stop this.
- You give tech savvy users a choice of the devices that they want to use. This may make them more productive.
- If you get and properly implement mobile device management or enterprise mobility management software, you can properly manage these devices. You can do remote wipes and separate personal from business data. Thus mitigating some of the risk.
If you were in your position, you need to use mobile device management or enterprise mobility management software. Plus you need to have policies as to security and paying for cellular data usage. Plus you need to educate your users so that they don’t expose your business to any risks that my exist, as well as to the benefits of BYOD. I think that if you do that, you can make this work for you.