It’s called Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, and it refers to the practice of allowing employees to use their own handheld devices (and in some cases, laptops or desktop computers) to access their work networks.
The practice is already popular. A Cisco study determined that 95% of the surveyed organizations are allowing employees to bring their own devices into the workplace in some way. The study also predicts that the average number of connected devices per employee will reach 3.3 by 2014, up from 2.8 in 2012. Further, more than 76% of IT managers thought that BYOD, while it posed some challenges, was a good idea.
But what are those challenges? Well, let’s start with technical compatibility. One of the advantages to owning your own technology infrastructure is the assurance that all of the machines within the enterprise will talk to each other and behave in predictable ways.
Security poses another risk. The owner of a small business that employs BYOD must accept the fact that there will be no grand consensus on the definition of adequate security. Consumers will largely choose convenience over security, so they will load passwords into their devices in order to access networks quickly and seamlessly.
Is your small business participating in the BYOD trend?
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