Corporate-issued phones are continuously being replaced with bring your own device (BYOD), a trend that enables employees to use a single device for both personal and work use. Makes sense, right? It’s convenient for employees to not have to manage two separate devices, especially when apps today allow for collaboration and integration and employers can lower costs. IT, on the other hand, is not as thrilled. BYOD means different devices, different operating systems and different security controls, which also means opportunity for security threats. As employees are enjoying actively organizing their personal and work e-mail on a single device, IT managers are experiencing headaches worrying about how easily corporate data can be compromised.
Fiberlink and Harris Interactive (News - Alert) recently conducted a survey that found these concerns to be justified. Employees are unknowingly putting enterprise data at risk – they are treating company data as recklessly as they would “a soccer schedule or recipes.” Twenty-five percent of employees who use mobile devices for work, either their own or employer-issued, have opened or saved a work attachment file into a third-party app, such as Evernote, Dropbox or QuickOffice (News - Alert); 20 percent admit to having cut and pasted work-related e-mail or attachments from company e-mail to their personal e-mail accounts; and 18 percent say they’ve access websites that are blocked by their company’s IT policy.
What’s shocking about the survey is not necessarily how many people are treating corporate data carelessly, but that some users don’t have any level of corporate security installed on their devices.
"Today's work environment is a comingled mash-up of personal and professional activities. It's not about sacrificing one for the other," said Jonathan Dale, director of marketing at Fiberlink, in a statement. "Many organizations, including our customers, are starting to prefer the idea of a dual persona solution because it keeps enterprise data safe while allowing employees the freedom to work on their own devices."
So, how can companies and employees alike overcome this carelessness and reduce the risk of data compromise? Enterprise mobility solutions such as Fiberlink’s MaaS360 (News - Alert) work to protect devices in the workplace by managing devices, apps, content and security, helping IT gain tighter controls without sacrificing what employees and corporations enjoy most about BYOD; the freedom and flexibility.
MaaS360 also offers Secure Productivity Suite, which helps keep work and personal information separate. IT sets the security policies like passcode strength and sharing options like to “cut and paste, or not to cut and paste.” With these controls in place, all mobile data adheres to overarching corporate security policies and stringent regulatory concerns for industries like healthcare, financial and public sector.
“If you choose not to support smartphones and tablets, our survey clearly shows people will find a way to connect Wi-Fi and e-mail regardless,” Fiberlink wrote in a recent blog post. “If you are supporting mobile device connectivity without enterprise mobility management, be ready for the inevitable, not probable, data leakage event. “
Edited by Blaise McNamee