Managed Hosting News 
Friday, 30th March 2012, 14:28:21
BYOD is 'more viral than a doctor's waiting room'
Businesses put their security systems at great risk when they allow BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, one expert believes.
Dominic Jones, managing director of Barton Technology, compared the virus potential of BYOD to a doctor's waiting room.
"If your IT (information technology) support provider is responsible for installing all the software your business needs on a multitude of personal devices, things will inevitably go wrong at some point," he said.
There are a number of data security concerns that arise when workers are allowed to bring their own devices in to the workplace.
Mr Jones pointed out that employers are limited in the boundaries that they can legally impose on their staff.
For example, they cannot control what websites the worker will visit when he or she is using the device at home.
There is the risk that the device will be affected by malware when used personally outside of work hours, and could then infect the IT systems when brought back into the office.
Also, employers have no control over whether or not friends and family are allowed to use the device, and therefore will not necessarily be able to prevent them from accessing sensitive corporate data.
"To me, this all adds up to more viral potential than a doctor's waiting room," Mr Jones said.
Privacy is an important issue not just for the firm but for the workers themselves.
Just as businesses want their documents to remain private, so do members of staff.
Therefore, it is unlikely that they would allow the IT manager to take the device and "potentially have a sneak peak at their holiday snaps while updating the software", Mr Jones said.
There are steps that businesses can take to improve data security in the workplace.
Instead of storing information on personal devices, they can instead use cloud storage to make data remotely accessible.
Posted by Phil Williams
High Availability, Highly secure Managed Hosting Solutions
Categories: | Virtualisation / The Cloud | Security |
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