BYOD stands for ‘Bring Your Own Device’. It is a policy that is being followed by various companies where they allow their employees to bring their personal communication devices like tablets, mobile phones, and laptops at work. This is also known by various other names like BYOT, ‘Bring Your Own Technology’ and BYOP, Bring Your Own Phone. Under BYOD, employees are allowed to bring their own devices that are in use for work at their workplace abiding by company regulations. BYOD at workplace is the future.
Why BYOD?
- It helps in the cost cuttings and productivity gains.
- An increased employee satisfaction from BYOD often leads to increased productivity.
- It is a natural observation that people feel very comfortable with their personal devices.
To create a secure environment for BYOD, organizations need to evolve and have to go beyond conventional cloud security practices. As risk increases proportionately with the number of personal devices, organizations need to be more vigilant than ever.
Factors that Companies Need to Adopt for BYOD at Workplace
1. IP Restriction
Most of you must be aware that free public Wi-Fi at places like railway stations, airports, cafes, and hotels are not safe. But, how many of you care when you have to send an important mail or submit a bid with near to end deadline? Not now, though, the admin can implement IP restriction that will block any such access through risky public Wi-Fi and networks. All the IPs under the Blacklisted category will be automatically blocked.
2. Geo-Fencing
With this feature, the admin can deploy a kind of protective fence around the company’s cloud infrastructure. There are many countries in the world that are infamous for their unethical hacker groups. The admin can successfully blacklist these locations through Geo-fencing while the page will be accessible from the whitelist location without any restrictions. Not just that, with the report feature, the admin can readily find out about various attempts to access the login page from these blacklisted locations.
3. Mobile App Restriction
This feature is also similar to IP restriction. With this feature, an admin can create two categories of apps – Whitelisted and Blacklisted cloud apps. Often, employees are seen to aimlessly surf social networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Hike, or shopping websites like Flipkart and Amazon, etc. Companies can restrict users from browsing such apps in the workplace.
Benefits of BYOD at Workplace
1. Enhances Productivity
If a company allows its employees to use their own device for work, then it inevitably impacts the productivity of their work. As the employees are comfortable with their device, so they tend to respond faster and work harder in their own desired environment.
2. Increases Employee Engagement
With companies encouraging BYOD, the employees are more likely to work after office hours as they can carry their own devices. The employees are available at any time and will respond to every request sent by the company.
3. Saves Money
BYOD helps in saving money for the companies as it allows their employees to carry their own devices at work. Companies do not have to spend on buying resources like a laptop, desktop, mobile for their employees.
Conclusion
CloudCodes For Business brings to you cool and safety features like Mobile app restriction, IP restriction, and Geofencing. Though there are many other safety features available like Multifactor Authentication, Browser Restrictions, Time based Restriction, AD integration, Password Policy, and Device restriction, the focus would be on the above three features in context to BYOD at workplace.