75% of US work force will be mobile by 2013 and nearly half of all mobile devices being used in the workplace by the end of 2011 were employee-owned. Bring Your Own Device – or BYOD – is definitely here to stay. Smart phones, PDAs and tablets of every make and model are going from home to office. Big names like Kraft, Whirlpool and some divisions of IBM are among the large organizations that have established BYOD guidelines for their employees.
Employees like using their own gear, and they are doing so in the office. With personal devices and 24/7 remote access, employees gain the ability to fit work around their lifestyles – 
which, for the individual, is a great incentive. With this flexibility users are in a better position to produce high quality work.
Rather than fight this new phenomenon, help your customers embrace this trend with proper policy and security in place. Among the most important are these five:
- Devices must be password protected. For further security businesses can use one-time passwords and alternate notification methods (e.g. text messages) are two ways to make the authentication process holistically stronger.
- Secure remote access via SSL VPN. Once you have authenticated a user, companies must secure the network connection. SSL VPN gives employees enormous flexibility to access the network securely from any location and from any mobile device. Furthermore, unlike IPSec, SSL VPN provides secure remote connectivity without the need for software to be installed on each device.
- Applications may only be downloaded from sites that have been deemed trustworthy by the IT organization.
- Mobile devices must support the ability to be remotely wiped of all data in the event they are lost or stolen. Also once an employee leaves the company, network access should leave right along with them. So a security set-up with effective and central Access Control mechanism is vital.
