Three ways to achieve data security whilst enabling BYOD

Providing the ability for employees to work remotely is a well-established method of attracting and retaining talent. Allowing employees to perform their job duties from mobile devices gives them the freedom of flexibility; specifically, the ability to work from home, at the airport, in a coffee shop, or from anywhere else outside of the office and regular business hours.

As such, an organisation's mobile strategy is more important now than ever before. That said, selecting the right one is often no small task. IT teams must consider their organisations' overall efficiency, productivity, and cybersecurity, as well as the privacy of their users. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rising popularity of bring your own device (BYOD) has complicated the challenge of balancing these items even more.

Personal devices that are used for work have access to both corporate data and users' personal apps. This increases the likelihood that malware will make its way into corporate systems. Additionally, this myriad of smartphones, tablets, and wearables also represents an easy entry point for cyber threats that leverage unsecured devices as a gateway to target otherwise safeguarded corporate data on the network.

Today, security administrators can choose from a wide variety of mobile and data management solutions. Here are a few factors to take into consideration when mapping a mobile security strategy and determining what will be the best fit for an organisation.

1. The classic: Agent-based mobile device management (MDM)

Mobile device management (MDM) solutions are generally favoured by large enterprises with the aim of enforcing company data security policies across a large number of mobile devices.

Typically, MDM solutions require software to be installed in the form of a mobile agent on all employee devices. This, in turn, enables them to be centrally managed by IT administrators. who govern features such as password protection, remote data wiping and the rejection of unsafe WLAN networks via a central interface.

However, a major problem can occur with MDM if the mobile environment is heterogeneous – that is, if to the network is to support numerous disparate mobile operating systems and devices. In that case, it's possible that management functions may not be available for all of the devices on the network.

Because these mobile systems are notoriously complex to implement, it's incumbent upon organisations to involve employees at an early stage of onboarding and implementation in order to ensure that the MDM solution adequately supports their workflows while also being able to look ahead and assess whether the administrative requirements for that device will tap IT resources and bandwidth down the road.

In addition, MDM presents several privacy challenges. In general, agent-based MDM solutions work best for large enterprises that employ adequate staff to manage corporate-owned devices.

When considering using these solutions as part of a BYOD strategy, organisations will need to hold discussions with the workforce and explain functions and access rights in detail.

However, as part of its set of features, MDM gives IT administrators significant access to user information, leading to lack of acceptance among users valuing more stringent privacy policies.

An MDM solution that allows the company to reset device settings, identify their location, or potentially harvest information on their device as well as usage and internet habits, has the strong potential to be regarded as an unacceptable intrusion into users' private lives.

As a result, it's very likely that those same employees will feel justified in refusing or block any kind of device security software installed on their phones or tablets.

The repercussions of this series of events could potentially have significant consequences. Not surprisingly, a dearth of devices connected to the corporate network bereft of any kind of security software opens the door for a potentially unpopular company-wide personal device ban.

2. From the device to the application: Mobile application management (MAM)

In contrast to MDM, mobile application management (MAM) focuses on securing and protecting company-provided applications if the solution is primarily used from a BYOD perspective to support the day-to-day employee needs –a travelling salesperson who requires access to email or in-house CRM systems for example.