BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, policies have proven to be a highly effective way for companies to save money. However, these policies need to address some of the shortcomings, potential costs and issues that comes with employees bringing and using their own devices could present to your business--not to mention security concerns.

Committing Time to Mobile Device Management
Mobile Device Management, or MDM, needs to be involved whenever there’s a BYOD implementation. There needs to be a designated contact in your organization to monitor your MDM software to ensure that your data isn’t being accessed by someone lacking the authorization to do so.

Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. Monitoring your MDM solution can very quickly become a full-time task. Before you commit to a BYOD strategy, establish if you can spare the resources to properly maintain it.

Obtaining Support
If a company provides their workforce with devices, the company is in control of which devices they provide. The company can select a certain build of machine and standardize the company systems. This means that IT only has to know how to handle one or two types of machine, allowing them to do a better, faster job taking care of your systems.

BYOD can often make obtaining support more difficult and time-consuming, and thereby less cost-effective. This is because you suddenly have to contend with numerous kinds of devices and the various issues each can present. As a result, providing uniform company devices could ultimately total out to be less expensive than allowing employees to use their own, depending on the abilities of your employees.

Waste
We’ve all been there--we get something, determined to use it, and yet it is never used for its intended purpose. This phenomenon can be seen in many cases of BYOD implementation. An employee will be approved for BYOD--whether or not their duties would be benefitted by their using their own device in the first place--and never use it for work. As a result, their employer more or less begins to pay for the employee’s personal device.

Lack of Control
It wasn’t all too long ago that Apple released iOS 11, which came with a new ‘feature’ that could more accurately be called a vulnerability. The device’s control center provides a switch to turn Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off. However, it turns out that these switches don’t actually turn either off, opening a user to attack. Therefore, using a device with iOS 11 installed could leave your business vulnerable if it is part of a BYOD implementation.

Now, we aren’t saying that you shouldn’t utilize BYOD. We just want to make sure you are prepared to mitigate these concerns and get the most benefit out of your Bring Your Own Device policy. We can help make sure that you are prepared. Call 415 IT today at (415) 295-4898.