UPDATED 13:19 EDT / FEBRUARY 19 2013

The Recipe for a Successful BYOD Policy [Infographic]

It seems BYOD isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and that’s a blessing and a curse for most businesses.  While employees are happily toting their iPads to and from the office, IT administrators are working hard to support a growing bevy of devices the company no longer controls.  The result has unseated years of operational tactics designed to manage employee devices, and that can be troublesome.  As we saw last week, the availability of iOS 6.1 for Apple iPhone users came with quite a shock to IT admin, flush with errors that made it impossible for workers to fulfill the promise of pumped up productivity that BYOD brings.

There’s a never-ending road of challenges for IT as BYOD becomes more prominent in the workplace, so how can this process become more efficient?  The latest chart from Symantec offers corporate decision-makers a checklist that covers all the key components of a viable and cost-efficient BYOD strategy.

The security software maker says that CIOs who are considering to overhaul their organization’s mobile policies must first and foremost identify their business goals: implementing BYOD on an organization-wide scale is a very costly undertaking that must be justified in the long-term. One the objectives have been set, you can start weighing your options.

Organizations in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance have less legal breathing room than their mobile-savvy peers in other verticals. The CIO must check if the current regulatory framework would allow users store corporate and personal data in the same place, and whether remote access is an option.

Understanding the user is the next step. Workers who travel a lot and don’t have access to sensitive information (contractors for example) can draw more benefits from BYOD than full office dwellers with legacy technology dependencies. CIOs must map user requirements and implement their mobile policies accordingly.

Certain teams or departments within an organization may be more tech savvy than others, which is why determining support capabilities can prove to be a difficult task.  Providing proper education and training for workers is just as complicated, but both tasks are essential for a holistic BYOD approach.

Bringing employees up to speed with modern technologies is only aspect of a full-blown mobile policy. The CIO must also decide where data should be stored – in the cloud, locally, or both – and she must make sure that corporate information is secure at all times. That means preventing jailbreaked devices from accessing the network, and keeping locally stored corporate and personal data apart.

See Symantec’s full infographic below:
Creating a Successful BYOD Policy: Infographic

Symantec – Creating a Successful BYOD Policy


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