BYOD and MAM – What Else Business Owners Want

There is no doubt that Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) culture has allowed companies from across the world to increase their productivity and save a significant amount of money. A recently conducted research revealed that the biggest factor that allures business owners to adopt BYOD culture in their workplace is increased productivity and decreased investment. The popularity of BYOD concept is rising swiftly irrespective of the security lapses related with it. Security of the data stored in the personal devices of the employees is the main concern of a number of business owners. Amidst all this, BYOD concept has proved that is hassle free and extremely uncomplicated. The innovation of Mobile Access Management or MAM concept has provided the business owners a sigh of relief as it provides an enhanced degree of security of the data stored on the outbound devices. It ensures that the personal and professional enterprise apps and data stays aloof from each other and pose no threat to each other's confidentiality.

The Mobile Access Management (MAM) system has proved to be a big boon for business owners who were aware of BYOD benefits but were hesitant about using it because of associated security issues. It helps organizations in delivering critical applications to the employees and restricting the access in such a way that it does not hinder their autonomy of accessing their smart devices. This solution allows business owners to manage and secure the enterprise mobility culture adopted by them from end-to-end. This is important because, personal mobile devices of employees may contain gaming apps, videos, songs and personal apps, which are prone to be malware or Trojan infected. MAM concept helps them keep a regular track by inspection of all the devices for such security compromises and take obligatory actions.

Another benefit that a business owner gets by allowing his employees to use their personal devices is a reduction in the cost levied by him in purchasing machinery and other hardware equipments. Any machinery is prone go wrong in a year or two and thus asking for repairing and regular maintenance, which is another field that requires expenses. BYOD concept frees business owners from the troubles of maintaining the hardware and paying a hefty amount of money as an Annual Maintenance Contract. A research conducted by CIOInsight revealed that some companies have saved up to USD 1000/employee in service cost, by adopting BYOD and allowing use of personal devices in office premises.

However, to avail these benefits, business owners need to enforce stringent security policies for BYOD devices and ask their employees to follow rules made to secure corporate data and other expensive assets. For example, before allowing employees to adopt mobility, they should ask them to install the necessary security measures like antivirus, firewalls, encryption software etc. Companies should educate its employees to protect sensitive corporate data from cyber criminals in public Wi-Fi locations and about incident response guidelines they should follow, in case of any unfavourable incident occurring.

CONCLUSION

BYOD culture that is well managed by Mobile Access Management system can increase productivity far more than the BYOD concept that does not involve MAM. The biggest example of Intel, where 23,500 BYOD devices saved around 5 million working hours worth of productivity or around 57 minutes per employee. This reveals that the concept of BYOD in combination with the MAM system has a lot more to offer to the business owners than what they just predict.