Making BYOD Work with Security Containment

Has your boss ever handed you a Blackberry and told you, “This is your business phone.” And in your head you thought: “But I don’t want a Blackberry! Why are they cramping my style? Those IT people are so controlling!”

Hold on a second. Let’s take a step back and see how such a baleful thing could occur. (Then we’ll see how IT can avoid the problem altogether with containment.)

Most companies, not just small businesses, want to allow their employees to BYOD. But there have been some critical issues with that decision.

The thing is: anyone with access to corporate information, even mobile devices, can delete that information with the click of a button. Without additional protection, any device can connect to corporate clouds insecurely, and those devices don’t have the necessary layers of security. The result is significant vulnerabilities, which they can transmit directly to the corporate side of the corporate firewall. Insecure BYOD is like opening the portcullis and closing your eyes, hoping the Horde decides to leave your castle alone.

That is a highly sensitive state for a business to be in, and most businesses recognize there is a need for more advanced protection.

BYOD with Security Containers

So to create a secure network with BYOD, we can containerize critical data, hardware and software. The process results in what looks like an app on mobile devices. Users click on the app and are asked for a password, the app can scan for viruses and provide any additional layers of security necessary before the device is granted access. If someone leaves the company, or if the device is stolen, then with the click of a button, that container can be deleted.

This gives corporations the power to enact protocol and technology that their employees want, but at the same time blending that with the right infrastructure and policies and security to keep the IT airtight. At the end of the day, everybody’s happy. Employees can use their iPhones and Samsungs, and IT people know that the corporate identity is secure.

This is just one component of our end-to-end IT Security Solution for SMBs.