People all over the world use numerous devices on a daily basis. And the times when personal computers or laptops were almost exclusive devices for office work are long gone.
Everybody has laptops, tablets, and even smartphones in their pockets, which provide almost all the software capabilities equal that of a full-blown work PC.
Such an abundance of advanced personal mobile devices paved the way for an innovative, business-boosting tech concept called Bring Your Own Device or BYOD. It allows company employees to efficiently work via their personal laptops and mobile devices.
Software and hardware budget cuts, a boost of productivity, and overall facilitation of whole IT departments – these are the ultimate benefits of BYOD. There is a number of cyber security threats you should consider and be able to prevent if you are looking to employ this tech concept in your company.
BYOD Security Risks
Considering the involvement of highly accessible personal mobile user devices, the BYOD policy implies the following risks:
Lost or stolen device
There is always a possibility that a certain employee loses their device or it gets stolen from them. In such cases, a number of security issues can be provoked due to unauthorized corporate data access.
Employees leaving the company
No matter which circumstances made your former employee leave the company – once you say goodbye to a fired or retired worker, the important corporate stuff stored on their BYOD devices may leak outside the company.
Lack of security updates
It may be problematic to check if an employee updates the software on their device in time. The whole office securitymay be undermined by an out-of-date piece of software on a single smartphone, which is an essential issue of the Your Own Device policy to behold.
Unsecured WI-FI
Employees may connect to unprotected Wi-Fi sources without even giving it much thought. Either for business or personal purposes, but using public Wi-Fi is a sure way to get some data leaked and get infected with harmful software.
3 Ways to Organize Secure Remote Access
A well-thought-out remote access policy, however, may help you avoid practically all of those risks.
Here are three ways to organize remote access to your corporate data. All you need to do is employ one of these BYOD security solutions for remote access and keep in check that your employees have one of the following types of protecting software installed, updated, and used on their devices at all times.
1. VPN
A VPN-protected connection is among the simplest yet essential BYOD solutions in terms of security. It ultimately provides secure remote access to any data stored on the corporate server. All because a VPN connection is encrypted and cannot be as easily intercepted or undermined in other ways.
With an efficient VPN platform in hand, a good part of the main BYOD risks can only pose a threat if the authorization data for the particular VPN software solution is leaked or stolen.
2. RDP
RDP is a Remote Desktop Protocol, which speaks for itself. Instead of accessing their corporate devices or, for example, online servers directly, your employees can connect to the PC via remote desktop capabilities.
This is a sure way to hide some direct ways of accessing any internal databases and confidential data. And it’s better to use two-factor authentication for RDP to make sure that RDP sessions may be compromised if the fraudster finds out the user password.
3. Cloud
One of the most accessible and user-friendly ways to enable an all-around availability of BYOD solutions for employees is to employ a cloud platform. You can pick from various cloud solutions to establish a remote digital corporate environment. Such BYOD software as Office 365, for instance, will enable your employees to work with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in one place, while reliably storing all the documents and files in centralized storage.
All actions in the cloud are usually synchronized and regular workflow tendencies are easier to monitor. And once more, to minimize cloud computing security risks we recommend you to enable two-factor authentication, better with hardware tokens.
Summary
BYOD policies should be thoroughly prepared and defined. The BYOD security risks we described in this article may cause long-standing corporate damages. That’s why allowing any remote access to company databases and internal software, make sure to undertake proper BYOD security measures beforehand.
