BYOD Best Practices For Mobile Management

December 6, 2016

Mobile Management

While many businesses, across nearly every sector allow their employees to use personal mobile devices to perform corporate functions and access company information, not all of these organizations have an effective plan for Mobile Management with BYOD program. It’s true that BYOD helps your company to save hundreds and thousands of dollars as you do not need to buy or rent those devices on your own. However, if not managed properly, you might end up committing a disaster.

In today’s mobilized business environment, 70% of individuals use three or more devices, including tablets, smartphones, and laptops, to connect to the corporate network and access company information. 26% of employees use two devices, and only 4% carry only one device. As more mobile devices are leveraged for work purposes, the increased number of data endpoints adds to the security risks involved with a BYOD policy. Therefore, administrators should create an efficient and management strategy to address security issues and minimize threats.

Here are 5 best practices to ensure BYOD policy is implemented in a balanced way to manage devices.

  1. Make policy guidelines simple and compliances mandatory. The policies should be legal and the rules should clear to all employees about joining, leaving or altering contribution in a BYOD program.
  2. As part of the management plan, your IT administrators should always know what information can be accessed from employees’ devices. In fact, not all information that employees are able to access on a smartphone is sensitive. Identifying data that needs more protection can help the IT staff members prioritize their security labors and work more efficiently within the BYOD practice.
  3. Policies regarding usage of unsafe Wi-Fi networks have to make provisions for the limitations of their security measures. Some networks could be considered off-limits, based on security guidelines.
  4. Create clear policies on which devices can be used for official purposes. For example, the device should pass minimum criteria of its OS version, key features, camera quality, internal storage capacity etc.
  5. Mobile devices offer an array of technologies, ranging from GPS and Bluetooth to cameras and audio recorders. Policies should cover the use of all these features specifically as they relate to work.

If these security measures are taken into consideration while implementing BYOD policy, your device management would become much easier and less risky. However, to implement these policies you need to take assistance from a Mobile Device Management tools provider with upgraded facilities. We offer MDM tools with advanced features for data protection and device maintenance. To know more about Mobile Device Management solutions, you can take 30 days free trial.