BYOD seems to popping up everywhere and companies are afraid to embrace it. Personally, I think it can be a cost saver for companies and make there employees more accessible. However, you have to make sure you consider how you can protect your network and sensitive data from unauthorized access. Putting in the right security controls at the perimeter of your network and internally to segment systems that store, process, and/or transmit sensitive data.
Take a look at the excerpt below from an article I was reading that discusses this same topic.
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Users are taking control, and there’s no stopping them from bringing their own network-connected devices to the office. Today, every phone, every e-book reader, every tablet is a gateway to a world of networked computing. Even if you tried to prevent your employees from bringing them into the building, only military-grade security could stop them.
The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is variously viewed as “a world of pain for IT,” a security challenge that’s solvable, and something to be tolerated with grim resignation. And there’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.
But my experiences at Sun Microsystems suggest BYOD is an opportunity waiting to be grasped for enterprise IT executives — a move to management by standards rather than centrally purchased company desktops. It means selecting a basket of server-supported standard capabilities (IMAP, LDAP, PDF, HTML5, ODF, and so on) and telling people that anything that works securely with those standards is acceptable. It also offers the prospect of letting people use open source software that works with those standards, rather than having to buy everyone the same expensive proprietary software and instantly depreciating hardware, then manage them expensively until they are legacy systems.
That’s not just a guess; I’ve seen it work. After a foray into a mandatory managed desktop at Sun for all staff (which instead forced people to break the rules and work around it to get their job done), we had a dual-path strategy for most of the time I was there. We had managed desktops accessed through low-cost screens for general staff; we obviously used Sunray, but contemporary options range from a bolted-down Secure Global Desktop from Oracle to the shiny delights of Google’s Chromebooks.
Read more at: http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/byod-the-precursor-the-open-source-desktop-189203
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