Bring Your Own Device

BYOD Has Become a Fact of Life

As mobile devices continue to get smarter, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become one of the hottest trends in the corporate IT space. The benefits of BYOD are compelling - by allowing employees to use their own mobile device at work, organizations reduce capex and employees don't have to carry around an extra phone or tablet.

At the same time, BYOD raises a number of complex device management and information security issues. Organizations must define responsible B YOD policies and implement the right tools to help control mobile device usage and mitigate its security risks.

Understanding the Risks of BYOD

1. Mobile devices are small and easy to lose. Compared to your PC, smartphones and tablets are small, portable and easy prey for thieves. People often forget their phones or leave them unattended in public places. The results can be disastrous. We all remember the story of an Apple engineer who misplaced his prototype iPhone.
2. Devices are personally owned and not corporate property. This situation naturally changes employee expectations about privacy and security. In particular, personally owned devices often mix potentially sensitive business information with personal data.
3. Employees will take work off-premises if they can. Employees will use their personal devices on the corporate network, even if they are told not to. A recent Harris Interactive Poll (2011) found that more than 50 percent of employees use portable devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, flash drives) to take sensitive information outside the company walls.
4. Employees value convenience more than security. If a security policy is overly cumbersome or inconvenient, employees will find a way around it. Don't underestimate the ingenuity of employees looking to circumvent procedures that slow them down.
5. Lack of effective tools to enforce secure BYOD. In a 2012 survey^[1]of 400 IT professionals on BYOD, more than 65 percent said they don't have the necessary tools in place to manage personal devices on the corporate network, and 27 percent said they aren't certain of all the personal devices that are accessing the network.

ActiveSync Shield for BYOD: Protect the Data, Not the Device

For BYOD companies, securing mobile email has become a business-critical requirement. Organizations need to be able to limit the content exiting the network to the absolute minimum and to allow such content only for users who really need it. While synchronization enables your employees to access email, email attachments, calendar, tasks and contact lists from anywhere, this process must be absolutely secure in order to prevent sensitive information from being copied onto unauthorized devices.

Most secure mobile email solutions focus on protecting the data stored on the mobile device through encryption strategies and containerization. Rather than focusing on device data protection,ActiveSync Shieldfor BYOD offers a new approach that completely eliminates the need to store data on the device.

Control Access Seamlessly with Native Mail Client

Active Sync Shield offers a unique access control solution, allowing users to securely connect from the public network to the corporate network, without any client install. 

ActiveSync Shield interacts directly with the ActiveSync protocol on the server side. This solution effectively controls who can synchronize data from the network and what data can be synchronized when users connect to an Exchange server with their mobile phones. Since there is no client installation, ActiveSync Shield is ideal for BYOD implementations since it supports any iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android or Windows Phone device.