BYOD – Bring Your Own Device To Work
Allowing an employee to bring their own laptop, tablet or cell phone into the workplace to access company data is a concept known as BYOD or Bring Your Own Device. Employees can easily work on the road or from home making their jobs more accessible and increasing productivity. While there are many advantages to allowing employees to bring their laptops, phones, tablets, etc. into the workplace and setting them up with access to corporate data there are also several risky downfalls. Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages to opening up corporate policy to allowing employees to BYOD.
Advantages
- Increase productivity – By allowing employees to use their own devices they can work on the road and from home.
- Cuts Technology Cost – Technology is one of the highest cost in companies today, where even small companies can end up spending thousands on IT support, technology devices, security, etc. If the employee is allowed to bring their own device into the workplace the employees are responsible for the cost of the product.
- Employee Satisfaction – Employees are usually more comfortable using their own devices since they are familiar with the product and set up and it allows flexibility in the workplace.
Disadvantages
- Stolen Devices – An employee can easily have their device with corporate data stolen at any moment. With many people and employees allowing stored passwords or easy to guess passwords makes the device more accessible to not only hackers but to basically anyone. Having a strong password policy is very important.
- Employee Breach – How much do you trust your employee? What if your employee goes to interview at a competitor company? These are important questions to think about before allowing BYOD.
- IT Support can increase – With a wide variety of Android and iOS devices on the market today it can take additional IT Support to help when issues arrive.
Overall BYOD is a great concept that can cut cost and increase employee productivity; however, if you are a business owner deciding whether to allow employees to bring their devices into the work place make sure you have a strict policy and great security rules and regulations into place.
Nettology Philadelphia IT Support is full service IT firm that supports Macs and PCs along with many Android and iOS devices. We can help your employees reliably, easily, and securely access your corporate email and other data.
