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Bring Your Own Disaster

September 25, 2014

Mobile devices certainly carry the potential to make for a more efficient workforce. Unfortunately, the employees think they know more than those that set corporate policy. The BYOD world normally means Bring Your Own Devices, where personal devices are allowed to connect to the firm’s network and access company data. A recent poll of IT and IT security pros found that one third of employees use these personal devices exclusively for work and the number is expected to rise to 47 percent next year. The really scary part is that security is being compromised for productivity. That’s why I think that BYOD is more appropriately termed Bring Your Own Disaster.

In this day of instant gratification, employees are driving what devices they want to connect to the network. Unless there are technologies in place to prevent unauthorized personal devices, there is no control over what data may be compromised or what malware may be injected into the corporate network from these “rogue” devices. It is expensive for the solo and small firm market to have some sort of mobile device management system in place to try and control the out of control employees. Convenience versus protecting information security is where the rubber meets the road. It is better to issue the employees approved, company owned and controlled devices to connect to the corporate resources.

No matter which policy you deploy, the problem is always going to be that employees will do whatever they want to do no matter what the company says.

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