5 New Year’s resolutions to improve your BYOD policies
Developing the right goals for your enterprise’s BYOD policies should be a key element of your end-of-year evaluations so you can put your best foot forward in the new year. Potential goals might range from improving policies to implementing new security measures.
BYOD adoption rates reached 36 percent at the beginning of 2017, and MarketsandMarkets projects a nearly 50 percent adoption in 2018. Here are some BYOD resolutions to set your enterprise up for success in 2018:
1. Make new friends across the organization
Use the new year to ensure that your BYOD policies and strategy have input from the right people. Build a cross-functional BYOD success team with members from IT, security, management, and business stakeholders. Stopping right there is easy; however, it’s essential to also source unfiltered input and opinions from your business users that do the work and serve your customers.
If you haven’t already opened up your team to include front-line employees, here are some qualities to seek:
- Visible, vocal early adopters of technology in their department
- Respected on their team for their use of technology
- BYOD resolves a business pain point for them
Depending on your corporate culture, you may have to work out some incentives to reward employees for participating in companywide BYOD policies and initiatives. For example, helping set policies and strategies could become part of their annual review or tied to their performance bonus.
Front-line employees involved in these initiatives can also become internal champions to help coach fellow employees who are reluctant to embrace BYOD.
2. Improve one area of your BYOD program
The end of the year is an ideal time to reflect on your corporate BYOD program. Consider what policies and processes are working and which aren’t, and present your user community with options for improvement. If you make changes to your corporate privacy policy for the coming year, for example, you must take the time to determine the impact on your BYOD users and communicate the needs for these changes. Cross-check your current policies with the technology you have in place to manage BYOD access to your enterprise data.
The new year is also a good time for your legal team to review your BYOD policy to ensure it is still compliant with applicable laws and regulations. The legal team can work with your IT department to implement any necessary changes to your BYOD policies.
3. Set a goal to improve your BYOD expense management
If your company grants employees a cash stipend to pay for BYOD expenses such as data charges, the new year is always a good time to audit how you are managing and distributing those stipends to your employees.
BYOD expense management is an offshoot of telecom expense management. “The global market for telecom expense management is slated to expand at a robust 13.5 percent CAGR between 2016 and 2024 to attain a value of $4.92 billion by 2024,” according to The Edition Truth.
Vendors offer specialized BYOD expense management solutions that you can integrate with your mobile device management (MDM) platform. It’s also sometimes called split billing because your organization has transparency into what data usage applies to corporate use versus personal apps on employee BYOD devices.
With a split billing solution in place, you can elevate the discussion — rather than just talking about giving a $50 monthly stipend to those participating in your BYOD program, you can manage the potential corporate and personal tax implications of the stipend, which depends on your country, state, and jurisdiction. You also can use MDM solutions to prevent an employee from downloading off-limits apps or content to their personal device on your dime.
4. Kiss and make up with your Android users
In the early days of the BYOD trend, Android was off-limits for most corporate BYOD initiatives. Fortunately, smart developers have been working to make Android more enterprise-ready.
Android 6.0, launched in October 2015, includes enterprise features by design, making Android BYOD finally feasible. More than half (53.5%) of Android phones run version 6.0 or newer, according to BrianMadden.com. If your users are using recent Android phones, there’s a pretty good chance they are running an enterprise-friendly OS version.
Major enterprise mobility management (EMM) vendors are also continuously improving their Android support, so you may already have the tools in place to open your BYOD program to Android users.
5. Get serious about agentless mobile security
MDM and BYOD have prompted privacy concerns in some user communities since the early days of the BYOD trend in some enterprises.
Focusing on just securing the corporate data that BYOD devices touch is the key to alleviating these concerns. You might already be using mobile application management or a cloud-first approach to supporting and securing BYOD users. Another technology to consider for BYOD security is an agentless solution, which enables your security administrators to govern device access without the need to install intrusive software on employee devices, according to CSO.
Make your annual BYOD resolutions and ensure your users — and your enterprise — aren’t left behind in the new year.
This post originally appeared on Mobile Business Insights on January 2, 2018. The site is no longer in publication.
Hi! I’m Will Kelly. My career has given me the opportunity to write about cloud computing, DevOps, enterprise mobility, enterprise collaboration, project management, and related topics for publications, corporations, and government agencies. Most recently, I was the senior technical writer in the corporate growth group of a major federal government systems integrator. While I still have the job title, technical writer, I have written little documentation in the past four years. My focus is on white papers, marketing collateral, case studies, and thought leadership content. Follow me on Twitter: @willkelly
