The Negative Effects of Bring Your Own Device Policy

What is BYOD

BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device, this is when employees from companies bring in electronic devices that can connect to the internet, this can affect the employees productivity as these devices can distract people when they are supposed to be working. This can affect network speeds as well as there are so many devices connected to a network. This can also be a security threat as people could download files from the company's server and take them home. After the device has left the building, there is no telling what the employee could be doing with the server files. The employee could be a secretly a rat working for a hacker group, this is a good example of an “internal threat”.

Examples: Mobile phones, Tablets, Smart watches, Laptops

All of these devices are connected to the internet through wifi, this could also be a bad thing because normally most of the time once a device is connected to the internet, it normally saves it so it will automatically connect to the internet again next time the device is in range. These examples are able to connect to a server and download files from it, the laptop mostly would be able to download ig amount of data from the server. If this is a big company with lots of competitors this could leave a risk of an employee selling the companies secrets to other companies. This could lead to loss of profits and the company's competition finding out their ways of becoming popular. Overall BYOD is generally a bad thing as it lowers general productivity of employees when they are supposed to be working hard, people are playing on their phones, generally losing money as the company is paying these employees for work, not half work and half playing on their phones and laptops. People bringing in their devices can also lead to people downloading files from the server and taking them out of the building giving the company no control of where the files are going or being to after they leave the building.

The Solutions to BYOD

There are many ways to prevent BYOD, the first thing companies can do is put a ban on all devices coming into the companies building, this will stop any devices coming in so there can be no stolen files or procrastination by any of the employees. The company could add some lockers and make a rule that all devices must be in the lockers until the end of the shift. This will also stop people stealing files from the server.

Conclusion

In conclusion BYOD can be a real problem within companies without a rule to stop this. Without any guidelines companies can lose important files, hacked servers or employee procrastination. This can be stopped by adding lockers for staff to put all electric devices inside. Or another way is a make rules where you cannot bring these items to work everyday. Devices can cause a real threat to companies by employees who are trying to be a internal threat to a company by working with a different company at the same time trying to gain information to give back to the opposing company.