5 Devastating BYOD Mistakes Your Company Needs to Avoid

BYOD policies can increase employee satisfaction and allow enterprises to take advantage of mobile devices – if they’re implemented properly. However, if you aren’t careful with your BYOD plan, your enterprise can make mistakes that could be costly to your business. Not only can these mistakes decrease productivity or cause resentment among employees, your sensitive business data could be exposed through a BYOD policy.

Knowing and acknowledging that you’ve made a mistake in your BYOD process is the first step — taking action to correct those mistakes comes next. How do you identify when these errors have been made? What can you do to stop their effect from damaging your business? Is there a way to avoid these mistakes before they happen? Below, we’ve compiled six of the most common BYOD mistakes that businesses make and how you can prevent them from ruining your enterprise.

One of the ways you can stop these mistakes from happening in the first place is integrating an enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. If you want to learn more about the benefits of EMM, you should check out our free 2019 MDM Buyer’s Guide. We profile the top vendors in the mobile device management field, their key capabilities, and our Bottom Line for each.

Not officially enforcing a BYOD policy

Despite its name, “bring your own device” does not just mean employees bring their devices and immediately start using them for corporate tasks. Each device needs to be properly vetted by your enterprise before employees can apply them for business processes. This is to ensure that a device’s operating system is updated, it’s compatible with your mobile applications, and there isn’t any malware or suspicious data hidden on a device. You’ll also need to install any enterprise mobility management (EMM) agents that your company will use to keep track of the device.

Not establishing criteria for devices

You can’t just accept any old device for a BYOD plan, regardless of whether or not the employee is skilled in using it. Your BYOD plan should outline the requirements it has for employee devices, including what it needs to be compatible with and how recent it is. This is important if one or more of your employees are using outdated devices or refuse to update their operating system.

Ignoring personal apps on BYOD devices

The applications on a user’s personal device can be a major problem for businesses. First, if an application contains harmful data or malware, you don’t want that device to be accessing mission-critical or sensitive data. This is why your company needs to perform a full security sweep of devices and applications before accepting them into the enterprise. Even if the applications on a device are secure, they can be a major crutch to employee productivity. If your employees are spending too much time on non-business related apps, that could lead to anger among your management team.

Not communicating with your employees about BYOD

When you introduce a BYOD policy into your enterprise, you need to keep your employees in the loop about what exactly that BYOD policy entails. Some employees might be concerned that BYOD is just an excuse for organizations to take control over their devices or access their personal data. While this isn’t true, it’s still important for your company to communicate what its BYOD policy means for the enterprise. You’ll need to install EMM agents onto devices to maintain security and access control, but this doesn’t give you the ability to invade on user privacy. Making sure your employees are aware of this will help ease the mind of doubters within your organization.

Not wiping devices before they leave your infrastructure

At some point, you’ll have to remove a device from your BYOD policy. This is a normal part of the process, but during this exit procedure, you need to make sure you wipe all the company data from that device. This can either be done manually by your enterprise or automatically through an EMM software. We shouldn’t have to explain why avoiding this mistake is so vital; you don’t want a device that you aren’t managing anymore holding sensitive company data, especially if the employee who owns that device doesn’t work for you anymore.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of enterprise mobility management, you should check out our free 2019 MDM Buyer’s Guide. We profile the top vendors in the mobile device management field, their key capabilities, and our Bottom Line for each.