Difficult Made Simple: BYOD

In this modern computing world with multitudes of various trends and innovations, we sometimes find ourselves lost in between new technologies, terminologies and words.Why do we tend to make things more difficult than they have to be? That was my thought when I started a set of blog posts describing the new computing trends in a simple way. Here is another trend that I would like to simplify – Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

BYOD is a policy permitting employees to bring personally-owned mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets or laptops, to their workplace to use for business purposes. By 2017 Gartner predicts that half of all companies will actually require employees to use their mobile devices for work.

Let’s start with the quick analogy to simplify the BYOD concept:

Imagine that driving becomes everyone’s right and not a privilege. You don’t need a license to drive your car and there are no longer rules that you have to follow. While most experienced drivers will still continue to follow common sense rules to ensure their own safety, there will be negligent drivers causing chaos on the roads that could paralyze our life in just a few days. Very quickly we will discover our trip to office might take several hours instead of 20 minutes, our safety while driving is always in question and it might be a good idea to find another job within walking distance from our home.

This is similar to what might happen to your company if the employees have no IT regulations or policies to follow in regards to their mobile devices. While most experienced employees try to make sure business continues, there are those putting business in danger by compromising corporate data, as corporate files copied to unprotected mobile device are easy money for data thieves. With security requirements ignored and confidential data leaking, your company might be out of business just in a few days and your employees will need to find another place to work.

In the above analogy your IT Organization might play the role of the Department of Motor Vehicles that introduces the Rules of the Road (BYOD policy) and allows those who want to drive to apply for driving license (install the software that protects the mobile device before providing access to corporate data). As soon as you get your license, your safety and the safety of other users of the road (corporate assets and data) become your responsibility.

Acronis offers Acronis mobilEcho, a solution that allows IT Organizations to provide their users with secure and managed access, editing of files and content residing on corporate servers from their privately-owned or corporate mobile devices. It ensures that data is protected by Active Directory-integrated policies with on-device and over-the-air encryption. Don’t forget that you always need a driving license in order to drive. So get yourself covered now – try Acronis mobilEcho today!

Download Free Trial http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/mobilecho/