Advantages and Disadvantages of BYOD

For those who follow the latest technology news, it is very common to read “BYOD” or Bring-Your-Own Device. The term has become popular due to the proliferation of mini-laptops, tables, and smartphones in the market today. Business owners are even mulling the idea of implementing their own Bring-Your-Own Device policy because a lot of people do have their own mobile devices.

One of the main issues of the BYOD policy is security because mobile devices are often the primary target of viruses as well as other security dilemmas. While the server may be installed with security software so as not to compromise not only the server but its content as well, mobile devices are quite exposed to security threats especially when the owners of these devices don’t take the necessary precautions.

If businesses implement a BYOD policy, there’s a need to synch company data with the mobile device so as to keep updated data in the device. Users of any contact management or customer relationship system would really want to have updated information on their devices even when they’re offline. Regular synching of data may take time as well as effort, especially when the user isn’t well adept with technology.

Data security can also be a problem especially when the employee is not longer with the company. Data stored in that employee’s device may be sold to competitors. This, alone, can be a cause of worry for business owners. Also, implementing a BYOD policy can result to more support issues thereby requiring more IT personnel to help resolve the issues.

For the past 10 years, mobile technology and virtualization have become a common buzzword especially in the corporate world. However, these two concepts have been in existence separately. Merging both concepts in the corporate market isn’t being widely implemented as yet. At the recent Mobile World Congress, Samsung introduced KNOX, a new platform which can perform virtualization on mobile devices. It is expected that KNOX will be widely adopted by enterprises within the year.

Experts believe that more than 50% of the smartphones being used by employees aren’t company owned and that these workers access corporate applications and data through their own mobile devices. This practice has raised a lot of risk and security issues. Mobile devices can be stolen or lost thereby exposing the companies’ data to unauthorized viewing and access. As such, IT departments of these enterprises must be able to search for these lost or stolen devices and lock them. Applications must be restricted by corporate IT by implementing blacklisting and whitelisting on each of the worker’s mobile devices. These strategies will lessen the risk of malware intrusion as well as improve worker productivity.

With all of these technology issues, virtualization must be deployed on mobile devices so that business and corporate applications and information can be stored in a virtualized instance on a smart phone. Because of virtualization, there is no more need for employees to have access passwords on their devices. They, however, need to input the correct password in order to access the business information and applications.

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