All of the rage these days is starting to revolve around BYOD (a.k.a. bring your own device) when going to work. In today’s society, surrounded by billions of mobile devices on the market and all of the mobile industry – BYOD policies have become something of the norm. What is BYOD? We’re going to cover it here and tell you how it can essentially help your business if you have some quality BYOD policies in place.
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What is BYOD Exactly?
The easy answer is BYOD is bringing your own devices to work, but it goes a little deeper than that.
These business policies allow the employees to bring their own devices to work to use and connect on the company’s network rather than the company themselves having to pay for additional hardware for their employees. Numerous benefits can be brought by this method, and it does help users to have a sense of security and more when they bring their own laptops, phones, or even tablets to work. It’s also a prevalent thing that many marketing, gaming, and social media companies have in place to go to work.
In terms of the remote workforce increasing thanks to the pandemic, it’s gaining even more popularity as people can go to work everywhere on their own devices.
Benefits of The BYOD Policies in the Workplace
As with any external device that you bring into your network, there are risks. Lucky for you, BYOD policies can help lessen those risks, so your employees can use their devices.
As we mentioned above, there are many benefits to incorporating this new-age feature for employees. Some of them include:
- Companies don’t have to spend as much money – therefore, increasing revenue and profit.
- It caters to today’s generation in terms of the mobile millennials.
- People and IT technicians can do their work in comfort, therefore helping to maintain and reduce turnover.
- It allows your employees and your business to use newer cutting-edge technologies that can help increase productivity.
There May Be Some Downsides to These Policies Though
Of course, there will be risks and downsides to BYOD if your business is not prepared. That’s why you must speak to your MSP or IT department before allowing employees BYOD.
To put these policies in place for your business, you need to be extra careful. Certain things need to take place – primarily because of your company’s data security. These security issues are critical to recognize and consider, though, because you’re going to need some serious endpoint security in place.
When your employees are going to be able to bring their own devices, you’ll need to allow them to register for monitoring services so you can keep tabs on their devices – ensuring that you aren’t having your business vulnerable to cyberattacks and hijackers – they’re everywhere now since COVID-19 has sprung in place. Therefore, you will also want to ensure that you implement very strict back-ups of software and antivirus protect your company.
It would help if you also ensured that your employees couldn’t download viable work information onto their home computers or devices, essentially making them only available for work only.
Other things that can occur when you have these policies in place are the legal costs should you have a security breach or the on-premises software issues you might have. You may have to hire an IT support team to provide a suitable solution and keep your servers in place.
What Do We Think?
It’s not uncommon for these things to be in place in the IT field, but they have to be super-tight. If you have your own device that you’re going to use for work, you need to make sure that it’s all you use it for. So no bringing your personal X-Box to work or your home devices.
It may become problematic if you end up blending both personal and work life. Then you end up having issues with the chance to have cyberattackers hacking you on both ends – putting you, your employees, your customers, and your business in a bad place. Fortunately, if you choose to adopt these solutions, you can always ask your IT company to get everything in place for you.