Rise of BOYD Culture and Security Issues Related to It

The ongoing technological boom is impacting every sector and industry by introducing new and amazing tools every now and then. All the newly arrived concepts and methodologies solely aim towards augmenting the productivity of the employees working in the company and keep them engaged in the company affairs. Two such raging concepts are Enterprise Mobility and BOYD (Bring Your Own Device). These technologies were accepted by the enterprise sector to keep the employee engaged and connected to the organization's LAN even while he was not present physically in the office. However, many security issues arose with both these technologies and most of them were related with the concept of BOYD. Let us review a few security issues that may arise within a company, if it allows its workforce to go ahead with BOYD.

1. Loss of Device – Every device can be stolen or get lost by the mistake or lack of attentiveness by the owner. It is very important on the part of the device owner to take proper care of it once the company declares it an official device. It has simple yet crucial reason that the device is now used as a storage and exchanging medium of many confidential information. Under these circumstances, theft or loss of the device could be a major threat to company's secrecy.

2. Professional and Personal Use – The concept of BOYD allows people to utilize their personal devices for professional purposes and this way, a device becomes a multi-function device. Often, it has been experienced by many friends of mine employed in multi-national companies and using the concept of BOYD that dedicating a device in more than one purpose creates a good amount of confusion. Sorting the unarranged and mixed data and files becomes an irritating task to do. 

3. Licensing Issues – In each case of BOYD, the IT staff needs to have enough licenses to support each application on the device. Moreover, because the device is now an official machine, it is expected to run on the original and updated version of the OS. If not, then suspicions are bound to rise towards the credibility and reputation of the organization.

Another major security issue arising with BOYD trend is that organizations cannot allow every employee to open his personal device, log in and access any part of the confidential data anytime. Thus, it has to impose some strict rules for data accessing and policies related to hardware and application usage. This will bring into existence, another very fiddly situation. The employees may find the situation annoying that they cannot use their own device with freedom during the non-working hours. The businesses need to find a solution to this problem before they could enforce their passwords on the devices owned by the employees.

Device compatibility is another issue to tackle, before an organization could allow its employees to practice BYOD culture. Often a situation may arise, where the devices used by the employees are not compatible with the systems working in the company. Also, it would be virtually impossible to test and certify each device before granting rights to access the confidential database.

However, I personally feel that there are too many security and other related issues, which have to be confronted by a company before it could implement BOYD culture safely and successfully. Not only this, but after its implementation, the company has to perform routine assessment of both mobile or immobile systems and devices.