It might sound counterintuitive at first that enterprises could receive direct government support for BYOD initiatives, but based on the latest federal guidelines from the U.S. government, this is far from an unworkable idea when considering cost savings and helping organizations streamline operations. As such, the new federal guidelines lay the groundwork for how enterprises can manage the rapidly growing BYOD workplace trend鈥攗sing guiding principles and case studies focused on cost efficiency, increased productivity, and secure implementation.
Clearly, for the federal government, nearly every agency has success stories to tell regarding large-scale BYOD adoption. These include:
· The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) under the U.S. Department of the Treasury rolled out a virtual desktop, allowing it to use a BYOD program without being affected by policy or legal constraints;
· The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), one of the earliest federal agencies to pilot BYOD, lets employees voluntarily choose to use government-provided mobile device programs and install third-party software on their own personal smartphones.
· Delaware Governor Jack Markell is one of the founders of wireless communications company Nextel. The state caught the BYOD wave early: employees who turn in state-issued electronic devices and switch to their personal devices can achieve significant cost savings鈥攃utting the current wireless device expenditure budget roughly in half.
Despite the cost savings and work flexibility that BYOD can deliver, the federal government has not given all agencies a green light to embrace this approach. It warns agency IT leaders not to let employees rush to replace government-issued equipment with their preferred personal devices.
As users implement BYOD practices, that does not mean the IT department already has security control over the hardware or stored data. The federal guidelines introduce a BYOD policy for users who adopt the model, aiming to protect enterprise departments from malicious access to their networks through employee mobile devices.
The federal government cautions that BYOD is not suitable for every agency (in other words: every business unit). Before adoption, it recommends considering three important principles:
1. BYOD can provide a great choice. The program should offer better flexibility, help employees balance work and personal life, and improve productivity when working offsite or mobile.
2. BYOD should be cost-effective, so a cost-benefit analysis is essential as part of the policy rollout. Two factors should be examined: how BYOD improves employee productivity and how potential cost shifting occurs.
3. BYOD brings security, policy, technology, and legal challenges, affecting both internal and external relationships. The data user accessing the network and work data might be your enterprise employee, and that data might also belong to your customers or clients.
The guidelines define three high-level approaches for implementing a BYOD program:
· Virtualization: Provide remote access to computing resources so that no data is stored or enterprise applications processed on the personal device;
· Walled Garden: An environment that controls user access to web content and services. It can securely separate personal data from corporate data on the personal device, enabling safe data storage or enterprise application processing;
· Limited Separation: Under defined policies, allow access to corporate and personal data or application processing on the personal device while ensuring minimum security controls are met.
Your enterprise may not yet be ready for BYOD, but your users might already be doing it. Some of them may have started implementing their own models in a peer-to-peer fashion, which puts your enterprise data and network at risk.
When deciding whether to adopt BYOD, the federal guidelines provide a detailed checklist for reference. Following that checklist will be a time-consuming and tedious process for IT leadership teams and IT department staff.
This is perhaps why the government requires signing a