What is BYOD

BYOD

Bring your own device (BYOD) refers to the IT or enterprise trend of employees using personal devices to connect to their organizational networks and access work-related systems and potentially sensitive or confidential data. Those personal devices could include smart phones, personal laptops, tablets, or USB drives.

IT departments of organizations must address how they can secure personal devices and determine access levels. Most important, there should be a defined BYOD security policy to provide awareness and educate employees on how to adhere to BYOD without compromising organizational data or networks.

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy within its acceptable uses allows anyone who has a smart phone or portable device to access to computing tools at any time to use them when accessing the corporate data and performing any other information management processes in the context of the organization-related tasks and issues.

When employees use their own device, it gives them the flexibility and increases their productivity since they are familiar with their own devices and, therefore, are bound to work faster and more efficiently. Some other advantages are mentioned as below;

Advantages

• Cost Saving
• Productivity
• Job Satisfaction
• Time effectiveness
• Flexibility

Disadvantages

• Security
• Data Retrieval
• Technical Support

Similarly the entire IT industry was supporting for the Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) software or application for increased productivity.

Now all the BYOA software your employees utilize, you start to get a picture of the possibilities for waste reduction. You can Integrate their favorite messaging apps, calendars, presentation tools and file clouds, and the benefit of work management scales exponentially as you add users into the system. If you make the whole thing accessible through a single desktop or mobile interface, you’ve created a really special work experience for the employee, and one that allows them to push and pull information to and from their teams with minimal communications waste.

BYOD Policy at a glance:

• Blocking access to other websites during business hours and while employees are connected to the company's network. The list of other websites, or types of websites, should be provided to employees.
• Employees may not use their devices at any time to store or transmit proprietary information or organization confidential materials, inside business information etc.
• Allowing employees to access company owned and provided resources only such as: calendars, email, documents, internal networks, etc.
• If the device is idle for five minutes or such specific time, it must automatically lock itself and require a pin or password to be unlocked.
• Any unauthorized app that is not on the company's list of approved apps cannot be downloaded or installed by employees.

So this is just a information on BYOD, for more details you can refer other sources. 

- DR