Top 8 Trends That Will Influence BYOD in Next Five Years
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is commonly being adopted in a modern work environment for providing flexibility and enhancing productivity. As employees become tech-savvy, devices evolve and there are technological innovations, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) will continue to transform.
Let’s look at some of the futuristic BYOD trends:
1. Outsource Mobile Management
Enterprises have a lot on their plate — to get about their core business, managing employees, administering corporate network and data, and devising policies. So, they opt to outsource mobile device management — deployment, supervising, and overseeing the security of mobile devices to mobility providers.
While larger organizations, still prefer to keep internal resources, expertise and security management in-house, outsourcing mobility management is gaining traction, for a nuanced approach.
2. Asset Protection — A Partnership Between Vendors and IT
Security is not limited to protecting mobile devices, it covers protection of all the assets, which include data, software (applications, products, services etc.), network etc. Gradually asset protection will shift from being solely controlled by IT to a collaboration between MDM service providers and IT. Controls will shift away from IT’s perimeter and network boundaries to a broader spectrum. IT will spearhead BYOD policy implementation and control what happens within the corporate network edges, while the vendors will deploy, manage, and control applications and BYOD devices.
3. EMM
Organizations are gradually moving towards Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) software, to leverage the full potential of mobility. EMM helps provide an infrastructure to formalize security policies and manage wide-scale mobility applications and systems by securing and managing work-processes, people, technology, and devices, all from one place.
EMM combines Mobile Device Management (MDM), Mobile Application Management (MAM), Mobile Content Management (MCM), Identity and Access Management, Configuration and Support.
EMM is an integrated set of methodologies and enterprise-backed policies developed to manage a broad array of mobile devices, networks, and services to provide a secure and reliable environment (devices and applications) to the employees.
Also Read: MobiLock Now Supports Employee-Owned (BYOD) Devices
4. Authentication Capabilities
As employees become mobile, and access corporate assets from remote locations, it is important to incorporate additional dimension(s) for authorizing access. Use of biometrics and multi-factor authentication is catching up.
- Biometrics: Many smart devices use facial recognition, retina scans or finger impression to verify the user. In the near future, biometrics could very well be used to verify staff to grant access to corporate data with BYOD devices.
- Device configuration combined with user authentication: All employees have their own credentials to log in to the corporate network. Also, each device has its own configuration. Combining these two factors, organizations can add a level of security to protect their assets. By registering the user devices as BYOD devices with the IT will help set varying access levels to the user-device combination, ensuring the right user and the right device has appropriate (limited) access to assets. This will reduce the need to place invasive monitoring software on personal devices.
5. Corporate Cloud Service for Reduced Costs
Many organizations are looking to explore corporate cloud-based services to support BYOD, as it is scalable and cost-effective.
Benefits of using corporate cloud services for BYOD:
- Simplifies management and maintenance of enterprise IT.
- Workers have access to a larger storage space, not restricted by device specifications.
- Cloud defense mechanism provides an added layer of security.
6. IoT
Internet of Things implies to the interconnectedness of devices with smart capabilities, which can significantly improve productivity and growth.
How IoT can help mobility and productivity?
- Interconnected devices help make mobility seamless
- Employees can work with any (connected) device available
- Businesses can garner employee information using their daily interactions
But IoT devices pose security risks at scale, owing to their population, ease of communication capabilities, little security measures incorporated my manufacturers and lack of security standards for IoT devices.
Enterprises will move to identify the need to incorporate IoT devices because of their popularity, assess security risks involved and devise a policy to manage and secure these devices. Some steps could be:
- Registering known devices if it has demonstrable benefits.
- Proactively monitoring and reviewing the connections of such devices to the corporate network, and adding and blocking them based on access, usage or disabling automatic discovery and connection.
- Create a separate network for IoT devices.
7. Artificial Intelligence for Improved Security
At present, IT departments may be overwhelmed by the number of devices, different operating systems, and applications. Given the advancements in AI and machine learning, security programs, and intrusion detection systems, can be programmed to detect high-risk employee behavior, undetected malware and vulnerabilities. Though it is a far cry from providing complete security, it can help you prepare and plan for risks.
8. BYOA
Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) is catching up, and employees will increasingly use popular consumer apps like Google Docs, DropBox, CloudOn etc. for business-related use. Though this will enhance productivity and increase employee engagement, security management for an organization’s IT administrator will become unwieldy. At present, no strong solutions are present to handle events like a data breach in a third party’s cloud environment.
If you are one of the organizations, ready to hop the BYOD train, the time is ripe. The current technology and ongoing innovations will continue to shape up better BYOD environment for you and your organization.
Also Read: EMM and its Key Components
Originally published at blog.mobilock.in on January 11, 2019.
