Bring Your Own Device Policy
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) refers to a practice of institutions and companies allowing employees to use their own devices including laptops, tablets, smartphones, et cetera for work. The practice has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way of enabling employees to carry out their jobs remotely. It also allows employees to access their institution or company’s data and network from home or on the go. Whereas Bring Your Own Device offers many benefits to both the organization and employees it also has disadvantages, especially risks related to security and data protection.
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Advantages of Bring Your Own Device Policy
One of the key benefits of Bring Your Own Device is the flexibility it offers. Allowing employees to use their own devices offers flexibility as the practice allows them to work from anywhere at any time. As a result, the practice removes the need to email documents back and forth for storage in the company’s system after working on it. In addition, the Bring Your Own Device policy gives the employer relatively greater flexibility to try out new solutions such as collecting field data with tablets and phones where there is a technical setup involved (Palanisamy et al., 2022). Another benefit of the policy is financial savings. Employers save money since they do not have to purchase devices for all of their employees. Also, employees are more likely to take better care of their devices than they do with the ones owned by the organization since they own them hence reducing the cost associated with repairs and updates among others (Gökçe et al., 2019).
Other benefits associated with BYOD workforce mobility, increased employee productivity and efficiency, improved employee satisfaction, and allows greater choice in device type for the employees. Moreover, it cuts down on device management for organization-owned devices and reduces software licensing costs and hardware spending (Palanisamy et al., 2022). Thus, it offers many benefits to both the organization and its employees.
Disadvantages of Bring Your Own Device
The disadvantages associated with Bring Your Own Device are related to security and data protection. The first risk of Bring Your Own Device is data theft. Allowing employees to use their own devices can result in some of the personal applications exposing confidential information and corporate data. Cybercriminals are always looking for improperly managed devices for opportunities to steal valuable corporate data. Another con of the practice is malware. Employees usually their personal devices to download various types of files and applications. In the process of downloading the files and applications, employees can unknowingly download malware that could be passed to the organization’s network when the employee logs in from the infected device (Gökçe et al., 2019).
In addition, Bring Your Own Device can bring legal problems. In case of a security breach stemming from the use of personal devices, a company can have serious ramifications since customers expect the organization to protect personal data. Also, unprotected and improperly managed devices can lead to private information leaking accidentally or intentionally. The responsibility to manage anti-viruses, anti-malware, security patches, passwords, and other safety measures fall onto the device owner. As a result, the organization has little control over safeguarding the devices (Gökçe et al., 2019).
Conclusion
Thus, the Bring Your Own Device practice has both benefits and disadvantages. As such, organizations should the policy with caution. This includes proper employee training on security measures to ensure that they are well-positioned to protect customers’ confidential information and corporate data. In addition, the company should sensitize employees in an ongoing fashion regarding always that their devices are well protected.
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