Bring Your Own Device is all the rage these days as it allows organizations to take advantage of the increased compute power in the hands of their employees and customers in order to reduce their own capital costs. Whether you belong to the IOS, Android, Microsoft or Blackberry camps, BYOD promises to deliver the applications and data you need anytime and anywhere.
The Challenge
To ensure a successful BYOD implementation and user experience, you must ensure, your internal and external Network has the capacity and bandwidth to cope with the increased demand, your support organization is ready for the onslaught of connectivity and potentially misdirected support requests they will have to deal with and most importantly, how do you ensure Security and compliance now your that your Applications and Data can be accessed on all these devices, which you ultimately have no control over?
Due to complexity and integration challenges, Security and Compliance are the areas in which most organizations usually lag behind. As a whole organizations are just getting to grips with how to ensure legacy and wired systems stay compliant with the myriad of regulations and compliance frameworks like SOX, BASEL II, ISO, HIPAA, PIPEDA to mention a few.
How does an organization ensure that its BYOD infrastructure seamlessly exposes information without diluting any existing security and compliance controls currently in place?
IT Leaders must work with their Security and Compliance colleagues to ensure that whatever system is implemented guarantees Data protection, confidentiality and integrity.
Relying on complex hardware solutions will lock any organization attempting this into large capital expenditure and spiraling operational costs. I believe the right approach is to leverage a software based solution, which integrates with your disparate and existing application and data sources to provide you a Policy based framework with inbuilt Automated data classification and Tiering, Encryption, Defensible deletion, AD/LDAP authentication, Remote device wipe, Self-Service, Content Indexing and compliance search on any device regardless of the Operating system.
There is no longer a question that organizations need to start seriously looking at BYOD initiatives. Users are becoming savvier and are inadvertently pushing corporate data further away from the controls designed to protect them. Dropbox and other 3rd party document sharing sites now contain millions of confidential documents that I am sure will make most CIO’s and Compliance Officers blush if they find out what their employees are storing on uncontrolled public clouds!
Before you take the next step in your BYOD project, stop to ask yourself if the solution you are about to implement will make your data available anytime, anywhere on any device and guarantee it’s confidentiality, integrity and availability?
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