How To Guarantee a safe BYOD Business Environment

Building a flexible team that is largely based from home comes with the requirement to plan your infrastructure strategy. Some companies insist on buying equipment centrally and shipping it to their team, no matter where they are located.

The argument for this is usually focused on security. If the IT team can set-up each laptop and then send it to the employee then it will have the same set of standard tools and be guaranteed to be free of viruses - or any other software than may cause a security issue.

The downside is that your business can rapidly become little more than a logistics company. Buying, installing, and shipping laptops using expensive courier services. Once you add in the problems of broken or faulty computers, damage in transit, and retrieval of hardware when people resign, the logistics issues are obvious.

This isn’t just a theoretical cost. Analysts have written in detail about how much it costs companies to manage this process of centrally controlling laptops and shipping them to employees - it can cost millions of dollars.

What’s the answer?

Bring your own device (BYOD). This is where the remote worker uses their own equipment at home, so long as it conforms to basic technical standards.

But doesn’t this just create the security risk that central control was trying to avoid? Times have changed. Security companies learned a lot during the pandemic and it is now far easier to build security into a remote system, such as a laptop.

Yoummday goes even further. We believe that security starts when hiring and onboarding a team member - basic security checks should confirm their identity and the experience they claim. Then each new team member undergoes awareness training, so they are taught how to avoid situations that can create a security risk.

Then on the technical side, there is a multi factor approach to accessing the yoummday platform. Even if a bad actor learned the password of an individual, knowing one single part of the login process will not be enough to gain access. Then there is a system that constantly checks the security status of the remote PC that is in use - has the system been updated? Is antivirus software running?

If the system doesn’t pass the technical security checks then no access is allowed. When access is approved it uses an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) to connect and then creates a virtual desktop on the remote PC. The remote computer can run the software needed to use the yoummday systems, but everything on the remote computer is insulated from the yoummday network - only activities on the virtual desktop will be connected.

This approach means that we can specify the minimum system requirement for our remote talents and then allow them to use their own equipment. When they are not at work they can still use the same computer for music, video, or gaming - all these local activities are insulated from our virtual desktop and it is therefore completely secure.

Some companies talk about their virtual desktop as the solution for secure remote working. We believe that it is an important component of a secure BYOD solution, but it is just one part of the wider solution.

Training, onboarding, awareness, technical checks, real-time monitoring, and the virtual desktop all work together to ensure that talents can work remotely and be completely secure even when using a BYOD strategy.