Organizations now have increasingly started to encourage employees to use their own devices, such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets, etc. within the organization. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) refers to this trend of employees using their personal devices to connect to the organization networks and access their work-related applications and data.
With many organizations operating from remote locations and supporting their employees working from home or connecting on the go while on work-related travel, BYOD has become more prevalent. BYOD solutions can potentially increase employees’ efficiency, productivity, and morale. However, they also come with vulnerabilities in the network while accessing confidential data, which when left unaddressed by IT, can pose serious security challenges to the organization.
BYOD has become essential for businesses, especially for organizations with field workforce. Below are some of the reasons why BYOD is vital for organizations:
Employees are more comfortable when using a familiar device. It helps increases the employee’s productivity. Moreover, the employee can work offsite (or work from home) without having to switch devices.
Introducing BYOD policies can reduce the costs related to hardware, maintenance and management of company assets.
Implementing BYOD gives a perspective that the business is progressive and technically enabled. With a proper BYOD policy, employees will feel comfortable to operate on their own devices and will allow them to feel more in control of their work. When employees feel empowered, their productivity also increases.
Virtualization makes it easier to deliver applications and data securely on employee-owned devices while providing them any time, anywhere, and any device connectivity. It allows IT admins to push enterprise applications hosted on a cloud or on-premises environment to employees’ devices seamless and securely.
With the current virtualization and cloud technologies, the data remains in the data center/cloud, thus ensuring there is no data loss or data theft when an employee damages or loses his/her personal device. The IT admins can even control what data (or access to applications) is delivered to the users based on the circumstances (such as the location of the user etc.). While the companies can take multiple measures to ensure security, it is also important to provide training and policies to the employees, around single sign-on and data sensitivity.