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More and more businesses are realizing the benefits of allowing employees to use their personal devices for work purposes. Bring your own device (BYOD) increases comfort and flexibility for your employees, improves productivity, and reduces startup hardware costs. Coupled to these advantages, however, are some new risks and security challenges for your business. You can address these when you make use of IT services in Houston.
What are the Risks?
Personal devices are harder to protect because it’s more complicated to restrict what people can and cannot do with their own possessions. Millions of mobile devices are stolen and lost each year, and very few are recovered. If there are no effective security measures to prevent unauthorized use of a device or to remotely monitor or clear it, there is a high risk of a data breach occurring.
Develop Your BYOD Policy
The best way to address the additional challenges of BYOD is to create a policy right from the onset. This must not be just another document gathering dust in the corner, but a practical and evolving set of guidelines. The policy must be drawn up with input from IT experts and the daily users of your network. When you take into consideration the feedback and experiences of your employees across departments and levels, they are more likely to embrace the policy and buy into the idea.
Your BYOD policy must address all the questions in its scope. It should be detailed and thorough so that users are clear about what devices are allowed, what apps are forbidden, what is considered acceptable usage, and what security measures are in place to protect both business and personal data.
Simplify the Process
The security steps and measures in your BYOD policy should be made as simple and straightforward as possible. Lengthy enrollment and access procedures can take away from the convenience of using personal devices.
Some of the practical steps you can take to this end include simple and easy steps to enroll new devices onto the network, the ability to configure new devices over-the-air, and a user-friendly self-service platform. You can achieve these with the assistance of a company providing IT services in Houston. They can also help you with effective management and monitoring of your BYOD program.
Monitor and Manage
No IT program is complete without a plan to monitor and manage it. Your mobile device management (MDM) system must be robust and up-to-date so that you can successfully achieve this. Some of the important information you need include the exact number of personal mobile devices in use in the program, how much data is being used within the network and via roaming, and when and where users are non-compliant. You must also be able to safeguard and secure the private contents of your employees’ devices.
To create and implement an effective BYOD policy, you need to work with an IT expert. ICS specializes in providing IT services in Houston. We offer tailored solutions to secure, manage, and monitor IT network. Contact us now for more information.
Further reading
ICS is a Texas-based 40-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.