Introduction
It’s impossible to quantify the value of a dedicated and satisfied employee. For any organization, its employees are its valuable assets. Employee satisfaction opens various doors of success for any organization.
BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is a step in the direction of improved employee productivity and satisfaction. After the pandemic began, the significance of BYOD (bring your own device) increased as employees started working from home. It resulted in increased mobility, efficiency, and employee happiness.
What is BYOD?
BYOD or Bring Your Own Device policy refers to the approach that allows employees to use their personal devices for office work.
BYOD is also called bring your own personal computer, bring your own technology and bring your own phone, etc.
BroadVoice, a VoIP service provider, coined the phrase “BYOD” in 2004 when it created a service that allowed businesses to route calls to personal devices. It is an excellent way to boost employee productivity and business growth.
Advantages of BYOD
There are various advantages to bringing your own device to work.
Increased employee productivity
Employees are more productive when they use gadgets they are familiar with. BYOD allows a better work-life balance and increased productivity.
Cost-effective
BYOD helps save money for the employer, such as on-device procurement, employee data plans, and IT management. According to a Staffbase.com study, introducing BYOD into the workforce will save employers an average of $1,097 per employee.
Reduced IT responsibilities
Employees are able to troubleshoot hardware and software issues with low or no IT support as they work with familiar devices.
This is a time saver for the already overloaded IT department. It eliminates the need for hours of training to familiarize employees with devices.
Challenges of BYOD
Risk to Corporate Data Security
BYOD poses a significant risk to the security and confidentiality of any organization. Accessing the entire company network and database from a remote place isn’t always secure.
BYOD encompasses a mobile device that is authorized to connect to the network but is not managed by the company. Considering that the user is often the weakest link in endpoint security, entrusting critical data to your employees’ own devices can be quite dangerous.
Cybercriminals can get easy access to your organization’s network if there are no rigorous rules on BYOD devices. If your employee’s phone gets stolen, confidential information might fall into the wrong hands.
Non-compliance
When employees work from home, sometimes employee efficiency gets hampered due to distractions easily available at their fingertips during productive hours. They might access social media and browse the internet which may gulp their productivity.
Employees can unknowingly share personal information with someone outside of the company network.
Increased Cybercrimes
Cyberattacks are increasing with BYOD as employees access organizational networks and servers remotely. Staying on top of these attacks and incidents is difficult enough for businesses with full-fledged IT staff, but it’s considerably more difficult in a BYOD environment.
Poor Password Policies
Passwords are important. While in the office, our IT ensures that the passwords are changed from time to time. But at home, with BYOD, that’s not always the case.
BYOD Management: The Need of the Hour
Despite all of the aforementioned BYOD issues, it’s tough for businesses to completely eradicate BYOD in today’s digital age. Employees enjoy the ease of use and the sense of freedom with familiar devices. It significantly has helped in increasing employee productivity and decreasing operational costs.
The challenges associated with BYOD can be taken care of with effective BYOD management tools and techniques. Many efficient MDM solutions provide BYOD management capabilities with which all the risks can be mitigated easily. Let us quickly understand how we can manage BYOD with these MDM solutions.
MDM solutions offer the following features to manage BYOD.
- Containerization of work and personal profiles
Many mobile device management solutions provide containerization capability. This way an employee can access work and personal information both on the same device. It reduces the need to carry an extra device for work, which adds to the convenience.
- Kiosk Lockdown
Kiosk lockdown and BYOD are a perfect combination for maintaining the sanity and hygiene of business. The kiosk lockdown feature can turn any device into a single-app or multi-app kiosk for business purposes.
- Allow/restrict websites
MDM solutions have the potential to restrict or allow websites and applications on BYO devices. This ensures a distraction-free environment, increased employee engagement and reduced data costs. It acts as an extra layer of security as employees can’t open any malicious links, even by mistake.
- Enforce strict password policies
Sometimes with BYOD, employees tend to not change passwords. A BYOD management software reminds about password expiry and also has a set code for passwords for extra protection and security.
- Location tracking
BYOD is majorly about working remotely or outside office premises. Location tracking and geofencing features help businesses track their devices for any unusual activity. The IT can get alerted in case of a geofence breach. This feature can be really helpful for logistics and retail operations.
- Blocking devices remotely in case of theft or lost devices
With BYO devices, comes the risk of misuse or mishandling due to device theft. If the data is not encrypted, any random criminal can access your sensitive corporate data.
An effective BYOD solution alerts the organization about device theft so that those devices can be immediately blocked over the air.
- Data encryption
Data encryption is important. Critical corporate data should not be accessible to unauthorized users at any time. This can hamper an organization’s reputation to a great extent.
Conclusion
The role of BYOD, especially during the pandemic, was appreciable. It opened many doors of possibilities for employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction.
With a powerful MDM solution packed with essential BYOD management capacity, there is no doubt that businesses can continue to operate efficiently.
