You may trust your buds when it comes to a BYOB party. But when your employer asks you to bring your own device, the math gets a bit more complicated.
Bring your own device, or BYOD, has increasingly become the norm in the post-pandemic workplace. To manage these employee devices, companies and organizations are turning to policies and apps to handle security concerns.
At software developer Jamf’s JNUC conference in Austin, Texas, this September, the company’s VP of portfolio strategy, Michael Covington, told IT Brew that its Jamf Trust app creates mobile work partitions on the device and configuring passwords. And there’s a security aspect to it as well; the app’s controller can remotely access that partitioned part of the device in case of loss or theft.
“When the user loses their phone, we can’t wipe their personal section—that’s going to be on them if they utilize that,” Covington said. “But we can fully wipe that work partition.”
Boom time. The mobile device management market, or MDM, is booming—it could be worth over $28 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research—in part because of increasing cybersecurity worries along with a younger workforce bringing their devices from home.
As IT Brew reported in June, BYOD brings with it an increase in threat surfaces and security risks that policies and apps can help mitigate. Rapid7 principle researcher Erick Galinkin told us that data partitioning and classification policies can do a lot to help the problem from spiraling out of control.
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“There are real tangible impacts of that information getting out,” Galinkin said. “We would never want somebody’s device where we couldn’t guarantee the security of that device to touch that data.”
Precautionary measures. Businesses today are rethinking their opposition to BYOD, Covington told us. If employees are allowed to check work email on a personal device, then employers supporting security functions makes sense. Taking that step requires making certain aspects of the process transparent and letting employees be a part of the conversation.
“There’s transparency at the core in terms of what policies are in place, and what will be monitored so that the end user is fully aware, and they can make decisions about what they do with the device and what type of device is used at work,” Covington said, adding, “The way you assess those two is different, not just from a tech perspective, but the outcome that you get.”