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Control emerging as the critical BYOD consideration

As more businesses embrace bring-your-own-device, issues like the lack of mobile-specific antivirus systems are emerging as key considerations. However, none of the potential risks associated with BYOD are bigger than the lack of control associated with such policies, CRN reported.

According to the news source, the move toward BYOD is a top-down endeavor. Just a couple of years ago, most businesses were giving BlackBerry phones to specific employees and carefully securing and controlling their use. Then, however, executives started to tell IT to let them use their iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Before long, business leaders became enamored with the potential flexibility gains provided by consumer devices in the enterprise. Now, BYOD is rising more rapidly than the mobile-specific solutions that can support it.

While the need to employ systems that properly foster mobile device use is important, the report said the most difficult challenge associated with BYOD is controlling consumer smartphones and tablets. Industry expert George Usi explained that the inability to regulate corporate data on employee smartphones is emerging as the greatest flaw of BYOD.

"The downside for [IT] is the inability to control the asset," Usi told CRN. "The employee now owns the asset; what happens if they drop it? What happens if it gets lost? How do I make sure the device is wiped? How do I put software on that device to make sure if it’s wiped, only my corporate data gets wiped? So that’s where some security problems present themselves."

According to Usi, a growing number of companies are turning to the cloud to alleviate the concerns associated with a lack of control over devices. Such a move allows businesses to give employees access to applications and data without having any of that information on the end-user device itself. This ensures company data is safe even though the computing platform is owned and monitored exclusively by employees.

The problem is that the cloud cannot overcome the IT service management issues that are introduced by the inability to control consumer devices in the enterprise sector. To accomplish this, businesses need to integrate mobile device management into the corporate CMDB. This lets them see employee-owned smartphones and tablets as part of the broad IT configuration. In response, companies can perform change management and service-related functions on mobile devices without having to worry about adverse affects on the rest of IT.