BYOD: How To Protect Your Company And Employees

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BYOD is a trend that continues to gain momentum in business from SMB level to full-on corporations. It can be a money-saving trend and very popular among younger employees, but there are important steps companies need to take to protect their intellectual property from multiple security breaches.

’Every company figures out that it’s essentially making more sense to allow employees to utilize their personal devices, but there’s always the caveat of ’What happens if I grant email access or proprietary applications on those devices, what happens if that employee loses that device?’’ said Evan Munno, sales manager at Kaspersky Labs,

’The biggest thing from an implementation standpoint is management, ease of management,’ Munno said.

Munno said many companies rely on stand-alone solutions from big vendors like Microsoft when they implement BYOD, which is a mistake. For a BYOD program to be successful and secure, multiple levels of managed services need to be in place, most notably, mobile device management. Munno said Kaspersky’s mobile security package offers a huge opportunity for partners looking to cash in on mobility and BYOD trends, particularly in the public sector where proprietary information takes on a whole new level of value.

And as for the days of carrying two phones? Munno said BYOD and the implementation of ’containerization’ – separating mobile work accounts from personal accounts, have killed the need to carry a company BlackBerry alongside a ’fun’ phone.

PUBLISHED JUNE 26, 2014