BYOD as a phenomenon is increasingly becoming common at workplace. Recently a global survey of CIOs by Gartner revealed that 38 percent companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2017. Vodafone India wants to capture a major share in the BYOD space.
Over the past few years, Vodafone, a leading telecom operator in India, witnessed a steady increase in smartphone and tablet adoption across our client-base.
As device variety and users within the corporate landscape have increased, so have security concerns of the enterprise administrators; they have been waiting for solutions to remotely manage and secure the wide variety of devices entering their organizations.
“Our mobile device management solution, Vodafone Secure Device Manager, provides enterprises with a secure management console which allows them to remotely configure and secure their organization’s device estate,” said Naveen Chopra, director of Vodafone Business Service.
Vodafone Secure Device Manager
Vodafone Secure Device Manager empowers IT administrators by allowing them to remotely manage security policies, device settings, certificates, applications, operating system etc. Vodafone’s solution can also prove to be invaluable in the event of mobile device loss, it allows administrators to remotely lock or wipe all information from smart device.
Now, with solutions like the Vodafone Secure Device Manager organizations can enjoy the benefits and easily mitigate risks associated with BYOD and confidently allow users to carry their personal devices for work. “We expect organizations to fully exploit the range of benefits on offer with BYOD and promote adoption of personal smartphones and tablets within the corporate landscape,” Chopra added.
Vodafone strategies
Vodafone India strategy is to help customers, both large and small and medium enterprises, to benefit from a secure mobility environment. The telecom operator partners with companies in their BYOD journey and ensure a safe and secure device environment. Vodafone’s business reach, better customer service and continuous investment in product roadmap differentiate the telecoms.
BYOD trends
BYOD is adopted in various forms. It can be either an ad hoc use of employee’s own mobile devices or supplement with own endpoints to replace corporate-owned devices entirely.
Some Indian enterprises have adopted it while many are still apprehensive about security risks that BYOD poses. But Indian enterprises are increasing witnessing the need to embrace BYOD trend to enhance productivity and efficiency of an organization.
A recent study by Cisco and the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) revealed that 66 percent of the chief information officers (CIOs) in the Indian enterprises encourage their respective employees to bring their own devices to work.
BYOD challenges
However, the biggest threat faced by Indian enterprises while implementing BYOD is accidental data loss or planned information theft. With BYOD, smartphones and tablets access corporate information from the same data-centers as personal computers (PC) do.
On one hand enterprises spend heavily on PC security, on the other they mostly leave personal mobile devices unsecure; they are seldom monitored or managed by the enterprises. BYOD can be a big threat; it has the potential to expose corporate data centers and information stores to cyber-attacks /data-theft.
For example, banks and financial institutions are entrusted by millions of individuals with extremely sensitive personal financial information. If this data is compromised, it jeopardizes the individuals’ financial well-being and the financial institutions security and its reputation. Hence, unsupervised and unregulated use of personal devices at the workplace by a financial institution’s employees poses a significant threat to the security of customer data.
Tips to CIOs
Before embarking on the BYOD adoption journey, CIOs and CSOs today consider adopting the appropriate mobile device management (MDM) solutions. This solution enables an enterprise to effectively secure, manage and monitor mobile devices.
The MDM applications can be loaded on a mobile device in various ways, from end user clicking an SMS message with an embedded URL linking to the MDM resource server to being directed to download the application through an app store.
Once loaded, changes are made to the individual’s device in order to make it compliant with the policy of the enterprise for mobile devices, which includes implementing security features. As more employees bring their own devices into the workplace, the need for enterprise wide MDM policy is becoming increasingly more important.
Rajani Baburajan
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