Doing business in today's world is dependant on mobility, and if you aren't ready to shift toward this new technology trend, you should seriously reconsider. A lot of the time, businesses will allow their employees to bring in their own mobile devices for use in the workplace. This trend is called a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).
While BYOD is certainly a powerful innovation designed to help your team be as productive as possible while on-the-go, it can also be dangerous. Employees need to understand the benefits and disadvantages clearly before they are allowed to use mobile devices of their choice, especially when it comes to confidential company information. Here are six tips you can use to build the best BYOD policy out there:
Choose Your Protection Wisely
A BYOD policy demands that you decide what is most important for your business. Your business's data is a very important company asset. Hardware and applications can be replaced, but the data itself is practically priceless. You want to preserve your business's information at all costs, while increasing employee productivity.
Make Your BYOD Policy Flexible
A rigid BYOD policy with little room for growth won't get you anywhere, especially when the technology industry has been on the rise for so long. It certainly won't let up anytime soon, so you have to put your BYOD policy into place with the understanding that it will change, and that you will need change with the times. Hire new team members who understand how to use these new tools, and always spread knowledge of how to keep your devices as secure as possible from the latest threats.
Take Advantage of the Cloud
The cloud has been bringing about a huge change in the way we do business, and cloud applications are doing the same thing. It's even more important for your BYOD devices to adhere to your current cloud policy. You should have whitelists and blacklists of applications which should be allowed and blocked, and your cloud-based tools should be aimed at improving your business's mobility and boosting productivity levels.
Analyze the Cost-Efficiency of New Devices
A big part of a BYOD plan is figuring out how much money might be spent on each device to make it compliant with your BYOD policy. Is allowing each of your employees to bring in devices worth the risk? In some businesses, managing several employee-owned devices could stand to be risky due to the sheer amount of money to be spent on them. Take advantage of tools that allow you to lower the overall cost of your BYOD policy.
Bring Your Own Device, Not Your Own IT
You shouldn't be relying on your employees to decide whether their devices are compliant with your BYOD policy. Make sure that they always run it by your IT department before making any big decisions. This keeps your company's data as secure as possible by guaranteeing that their devices are on par with your BYOD standards.
Balancing Work and Life
You can probably guess that a business might run into problems with their BYOD policy when employees start to use their work devices for other things at home. For instance, the same device that can hold confidential budget information could also hold a shopping list, or a loan application. A quality BYOD policy should be able to take these instances into account and isolate the IT from personal information on your employees' devices.
A proper BYOD policy can go a long way toward modernizing your business, but if this is a first for you, you shouldn't jump in with both feet. Let Grove Networks give you a hand setting up your BYOD policy with our productivity and security solutions. We'll make sure that your employees won't just be bringing their own devices - they'll be bringing in the business, too. Give us a call at (305) 448-6126 for more on how Grove Networks can help your business achieve success.
