How Aura Designed A New Approach To BYOD Security For MSPs

Employees today are working across more devices and more locations than ever before, relying heavily on personal phones and computers to access business applications. While that flexibility supports remote work, it has also introduced new security risks for managed service providers supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environments. Jason Coville, chief channel officer at Aura, breaks down those challenges in a CRNtv interview with host Sydney Neely.

Sydney Neely: In today’s remote-first world, how are employee-owned devices changing the security conversation for MSPs?

Jason Coville: I think it changes quite a bit. As we’ve entered a new world where business applications are being put on personal devices every day, the need for them to be secure is more important than ever. At the same time, the ability for that security to be easy to use, deploy and manage is incredibly important for MSPs right now.

Neely: A lot of MSPs use mobile device management to secure client-owned devices, but business data breaches via personal devices are on the rise. Why doesn’t traditional MDM fully protect against phishing, identity-based attacks and other threats in BYOD environments?

Coville: MDM does a lot of those things, and I think there’s a time and a place for them. If you look at a lot of smaller organizations that aren’t using an MDM or a mobile access manager, they’re kind of left to their own devices to keep themselves secure. It’s hard for MSPs to keep up with that power struggle between how customers want to maintain security on those devices and how much control they’re willing to give up.

Neely: That leaves MSPs in a tough spot. They want to protect employee-owned devices, but they don’t want to create privacy concerns or add more work for their teams. What are partners actually asking for when it comes to BYOD security?

Coville: Partners want something that’s easy. They want something that’s easy to deploy and easy to manage. Privacy is probably the biggest pain point for them. How you bifurcate that privacy between the employee and the employer is incredibly important. MSPs want to clearly communicate where privacy starts and stops and make sure there’s proper support for this ever-changing BYOD world.

Neely: Aura has spent years protecting millions of consumers from identity fraud and real-world scams. How does that experience translate to the MSP world, and why does it matter right now?

Coville: Our MSP product was really born out of demand from the MSP community. We already had a successful consumer business around fraud and identity theft, and we also have a strong employee benefits business where we work with large insurance providers and organizations.

For us, we built a bespoke MSP offering based on platforms that already existed, then layered in a business application component so MSPs could provide better BYOD services than what they were seeing in the market. We talked to more than 200 MSPs at recent events about how they’re solving BYOD today, and a lot of them said they don’t really address it at all because it’s on personal devices.

They don’t want the power struggle, and they often use four-letter words to describe MDM products they’ve had to push out in the past. That tension between employee privacy and employer security is real.

Our approach was to focus on privacy by keeping employee data with the employee and not sharing it with the employer or the MSP, while still giving businesses the ability to block risky applications and stay secure.

To learn more about how Aura supports MSPs and is changing BYOD security, visit Aura.com/msp.