BYOD – “Bring Your Own Device” is picking up the trend for employers to allow employees to get their job done from anywhere and anytime on-demand. BYOD works best in umpteen ways giving mutual benefits to both employers and employees – It boosts productivity, no investmest on systems, employees are available to work from anywhere and anytime and no downtime. However, the coin has other side too, we just cant get devoured by the benefits, there are equal amount of drawbacks too.. the proliferation of BYOD connects more personal devices to the network that probes in a greater chance of security risks.
With BYOD in place, an effective band of protection is needed. Mobile devices that are used by employees to connect to the organization’s network are highly susceptible to threats and malware attacks.
The following are the 4 risks factors for any enterprises
Fail to Encrypt: Most of the users fail to understand the need for mobile device security. These unencrypted mobile devices are further used for BYOD purposes. They do not realize the need of mobile device protection. Users should consider protection as most of the sensitive information are being dealt through the device. Hence organizations should enforce security audits on BYOD devices.
Check on the Downloads – Most of the organizations that implement the use of mobile devices, do not give importance to check on mobile device protection and is not considered as a norm of the regular IT security audits. Companies are not really focussed on any rules and regulation on what and what not has to be downloaded on the mobile devices. Downloading random files and sharing it through BYOD, exposes the devices to malware threats. By do so, an employee might knowingly or unknowingly compromise company data.
Devices when lost!! – By any chance, if the employee loses the device, there is a high potential to put the organization’s network at risk of cyber attacks. There is a higher probability for an employee’s mobile phones or laptops or tablets to go missing, misplaced or stolen. This calls for a mandatory tracking of mobile devices to avoid malware risks.
Limited Protection with so many threats around – With multitude of devices connected to the organization’s network, the entry way for malicious threats becomes much easier. The mobile devices, if not protected are vulnerable to any suspicious attacks. Ensure mobile device protection by updating the devices with new security patches and installing antivirus and mobile security applications.
