How to Keep BYOD from Impacting Security

Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is a common approach for businesses that want to take advantage of mobile technology to kickstart productivity. Instead of supplying each individual employee with company-owned devices, businesses allow employees to use their own devices for work-related purposes. While this is great on the budget, it’s only really effective (and safe) if the employee prioritizes security on their devices; otherwise, it’s a liability.

The Concept of Threat Surface Level

BYOD is great for improving productivity, but it comes at the cost of greater security risks associated with increasing the threat surface level of your business.

Simply put, the more devices you have on your network, and the more devices that have access to your company’s resources, the greater the odds of something bad happening to them. It doesn’t matter what kind of devices they are; even a smartwatch could pose a risk to your business, if it’s connected to the Internet and it has access to your network. This is why BYOD is only truly effective as an operations model if you have policies and procedures in place to secure these devices.

A sound BYOD strategy is the key to making the most of employee-owned devices so you can carry out operations without fear.

Access Control Challenges

Half the battle of BYOD is access control, meaning who has access to what information and on what devices.

We’ll say right now that no employee, not even upper management or executives, should have access to everything. Case in point: sensitive information managed by your human resources team, like Social Security numbers. The fewer people who have access to sensitive information, the better the odds that data will remain secure.

Smart use of access control features that limit access based on job role and duties performed will go a long way toward protecting your business (and its assets).

The Key Components of a BYOD Policy

There are, of course, other components to a BYOD policy, including blacklisting/whitelisting apps and remote wiping.

When you blacklist and whitelist apps, you’re telling employees that these are tools approved for work purposes (and which ones aren’t). This prevents them from using apps that IT hasn’t approved, or those that could have malicious intentions. Remote wiping lets you wipe data on any stolen or compromised devices, meaning that even under the worst circumstances, you have one last failsafe to protect your business.

White Mountain IT Services can help you implement any of the above tools to keep your business and its mobile devices secure. Learn more by calling us today at (603) 889-0800.

White Mountain IT

Related Posts

Onsite IT Services vs Remote Support

Businesses today rely on technology more than ever, but not every IT challenge can be solved the same way. Some issues demand an immediate onsite presence, while others can be resolved quickly through remote support. Understanding when each approach delivers the most value is what separates a reactive IT strategy from a smart one. The right mix of support can keep your operations running without u...

Five Password Best Practices You Must Keep in Mind for 2024

Passwords have long been one of the central pillars of account security on the Internet. Combined with a username, they make up the foundation of most login systems. Because of this, they are a hot commodity for hackers who want to steal credentials and infiltrate accounts or networks. In recent years, however, other security measures have exposed the weakness of poor passwords for security, leadi...

Ticketmaster Suffers Major Data Breach

The world’s largest ticket retailer is in hot water after their parent company, Live Nation Entertainment filed an 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange commission admitting that they had been hacked to the tune of 1.3 terabytes of information. That amounts to 560 million customers’ personal information that has been stolen from the company’s servers. Today, we take a look at the hack and what...

Have You Ever Considered What a Ransomware Attack Actually Does to Your Business?

Last week, we discussed the many impacts your business suffering from ransomware has on “second-order harm,” downstream businesses, and average, ordinary people. This time, we wanted to return to “first-order harms”… those the impacted business has to deal with itself. Obviously, the First Place Ransomware Hurts is the Business When we last discussed the impacts of ransomware, we skipped over ...