BYOD ICT
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http://dcseurope.info/n/bqtu
Understanding your company’s BYOD blueprint
While the BYOD trend enables employee productivity, the drawback associated with it is without a doubt the possible security risk it brings to organisations. By Tom Murphy, CMO, Bradford Networks.
U
niversities have been dealing with ‘bring your own
devices’ (BYOD) and consumerisation trends for many years. At the start of each academic year, thousands of new students bring an array of IP-enabled mobile devices, including tablets, smartphones and laptops, to university and try and connect to the network. This causes a number of network access control, productivity and IT security issues.
As a growing number of self-enabled IT staff and employees bring their own devices into work and connect to corporate networks, enterprises are beginning to face the same issues, but are largely unprepared to deal with them. Typically, many universities solved this problem through using network access control (NAC) security solutions. So, what can CIOs in enterprises learn about NAC and dealing with BYOD from their higher education counterparts?
Furthermore, in typical BYOD scenarios, another problem most CIOs face is who and what do they allow onto their networks? How do they enable access without compromising security and how do they balance the security challenge with organisational productivity?
What we learnt about NAC from academic institutions
Previously NAC had a negative reputation as a tool that could only ‘scan and block’ access to networks. Although true, the technology has evolved considerably in the higher education sector, where it has been further refined for use by enterprises.
Within universities, at the start of each new term the aim is to manage sudden simultaneous spikes of people trying to access the network, while maintaining security and productivity. As you can imagine, this scenario could cause havoc for an already overloaded IT department. What has developed from this is the idea of ‘self-registration’. This
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capability has become an invaluable asset to IT teams across all organisations. It automates and speeds up the ‘on-boarding process’ at scale and enables the IT team to focus on problem devices.
All organisations differ in the types and amount of data they store. Universities mostly store academic and research data, whereas companies store a variety of business-critical data. NAC technology has evolved to accommodate this, again, at scale. It can group users according to the type of data they require access to.
Across universities there are usually around four types of users who require network access: administration, faculty and research, staff and students. In the corporate sector, the number of users and devices requiring network access often exceeds hundreds of types of users.
Building and implementing a BYOD policy The following steps describe how to enable a BYOD environment that suits the enterprise and its workforce. The approach shifts focus from traditional command and control to a more flexible policy-based network provisioning that supports personal mobile devices.
Determine which mobile devices are allowed on the network The first step is to determine what devices need to be supported and if they are secure enough to be granted network access.
Determine which OS versions are allowed on the network Determine which operating system version needs to be installed on each device and ensure software patches are kept current so that the device does not become susceptible to viruses and spyware. Mobile Device Management (MDM) software that users download and install on their mobile devices automatically keep devices up to date, much like the patching mechanisms used to update PCs. MDM can also remotely wipe a compromised device.
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