Cloud Communications

Thinking About Jumping the BYOD Bandwagon? What You Need to Know First.

By Erin Harrison Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

The proliferation of smart devices has spawned a trend known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) at businesses across the world, where employees bring their own smartphones, tablets and other devices to access work applications, e-mail and other resources to carry out their jobs.

While BYOD brings some benefits to businesses, it also creates challenges including security and liability issues, according to a recent GFI blog post by Andrew Zammit Tabon, who outlines some of the pros and cons of this rapidly growing phenomenon.

Among the benefits are productivity, convenience, organization appeal and cost-savings. For example, rather than the organization paying for an additional device and a service contract, they can shift the cost to the user. Organizations might choose to pay nothing, only pay for the service contract, or perhaps provide an allowance to employees who wish to use their personal device for work purposes.

From a security perspective, implementation of the right software at both the server level and end user device level are highly important, according to Tabon. Businesses need to consider security issues including which resources employees can access and if a device is lost, how to ensure the protection of company data on the device.

Before implementing BYOD policies, businesses need to conduct a formal risk assessment, which should review the following:

1.      Identify the associated BYOD risks that are applicable to your organization.

2.      Help you to draw up a mitigation strategy for any identified risks.

3.      Decide if the identified risks are something you are willing to accept.

If your business is considering BYOD policies, it will come down to trying to balance productivity and security.

The looming consequences of overlooking implementing reliable network security was discussed in a recent interview with GFI Security Research Manager Emmanuel Carabott, who exclusively detailed the problems with pushing this requirement aside.

The e consequences of overlooking cloud-based security are handled on a case-by-case basis. Many times, individuals sit back and relax knowing that their data is “safely” stored in the cloud, when in actuality this opens up room for an attacker to enter through any leak and access unauthorized information, perhaps even using this attack on your network to propel similar attacks on additional ones.

When it comes to your cloud-based network security, it’s best to work with a recognized software leader for small to medium-sized businesses, such as GFI Software.

To discover more on what GFI Software’s award-winning network security and cloud communications solutions can do for you, click here.

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