July - 2016 - issue > CEO Insights
Mitigating the Security Risks in BYOD
Prasenjit Saha, CEO - IMS & Security Division, Happiest Minds Technologies
As a part of the rise of consumerism of IT, there is a growing trend across organizations and industries - BYOD or Bring Your Own Device. Organizations have started allowing employees to work on devices they choose to as long as productivity increases. In this way, employees remain satisfied and costs for businesses are reduced. In today's work environment, it is perfectly okay to check and respond to official emails on a personal mobile/smartphone. BYOD culture encompasses BYOT - Bring Your Own Technology, BYOP - Bring Your Own Phone and BYOPC - Bring Your Own PC initiatives.
While enterprise BYOD adoption rates vary depending on the industry and geographical regions they operate in, the widespread usage of consumer smartphones, tablets and smartwatches are here to stay. BYOD is an attractive business model in the current economic environment as it allows employee satisfaction in terms of flexible working hours (employees prefer to use both corporate provided devices and their own), increased productivity and reduction of cost to the company. However, BYOD has a dark side too. It has a noteworthy impact on the traditional IT model; protecting the perimeter of threat attacks is now blurred, both in terms of physical location and asset ownership. The hardest hits are small and medium organizations who cannot afford in-house resources and knowledge to mitigate these challenges.
Each organization needs to ask themselves the few basic questions while allowing BYOD:
- Which type of corporate data can be processed on personal devices?
- How to encrypt and secure access to corporate data?
|
|
