The spotlight on corporate data tends to focus on protected information, like financial data or limited access files. But in today’s world of Bring Your Own Anything (BYOx), corporate data can easily mingle with an employee’s personal data, such as family photos, social media accounts and even productivity apps they choose to use for work. Smartphones have made it all too easy for employees to bring personal computing devices into the workplace, accessing corporate networks and internal data, heightening IT concerns over BYOx policies and data management.

Today we hear from four industry experts on how BYOx trends have specifically changed the way companies handle data management, concerning both corporate and personal information.

Managing private & personal data for BYOx era

David Appelbaum Sr. VP of Marketing Moka5 

Moka5 uses containers to manage and secure only the corporate data and apps – isolating it from the host and maintaining barriers between it and personal data. All without performance degradation or intrusive policies that crop up at the most inappropriate times – taking a snapshot of your daughter’s recital and running afoul of camera policies for example. Moka5 assumes the host to be insecure and therefore only worries about managing and securing the corporate data which is a vastly more efficient and focused way to handle this.

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Blake Brannon of AirWatch

Blake Brannon, senior solutions engineer, AirWatch by VMware

In a BYOx environment, selecting a solution that is OEM agnostic (iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, etc.) will increase employee adoption and IT control. Data loss prevention should also be paramount in any BYOx environment and AirWatch can provide that assurance – in addition to various DLP settings (prevent copy/paste, restrict screenshot, watermarking) we are able to remotely wipe a lost or stolen device, or simply remove the corporate content from an employee’s device that has left the company, while keeping personal data (i.e. baby photos) untouched.

Adam Ely, COO and Co-founder of Bluebox Security

BYOx is shifting the focus away from mobile device management and toward corporate data management. BYOx is completely changing the way companies look at security by focusing on the data rather than the device. Now, IT must find a way to monitor and secure data that runs through personally owned devices.

In order to ensure the enterprise is transacting business securely, companies need to have the following:

1. The ability to see where data is in the mobile ecosystem and how it is being used.

2. The ability to enact and enforce dynamic data policies and controls that are informed by actual mobile usage patterns

3. The ability to act and respond to potential data loss incidents, especially of sensitive data.

Carl Rodrigues, SOTI CEO

Carl Rodrigues, SOTI CEO

While BYOx devices today within the enterprise today are limited primarily to smartphones, tables, phablets and some peripherals, that will change. Variations of BYOx devices are very broad and will only increase.  IT must provide a consistent user experience so that data displays properly across device types and does not degrade when sent from device to device. IT needs to also consider what happens when data leaves the corporate network. If an employee, for example, receives an email in their corporate inbox with a PDF attachment, can that attachment be forwarded to their personal email inbox or even copied and pasted into another application? With Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions, IT can set policies that prevent these two scenarios. As an extra measure of security, however, it’s critically important that the data be encrypted so that data cannot be read should it leave the corporate network.

Companies also need be thinking about protecting the data that resides on BYOx devices at all times, even when a device is lost or stolen. If a CEO has his smartphone stolen while traveling in Tokyo, for example, his IT administrator in New York can use EMM solution to lock or wipe the device to prevent unwanted access to the valuable information and intelligence residing on the device. When using one of the more advanced EMM solutions, the administrator can even identify the device’s location using geo-location device tracking and assist authorities in recovering the device. We’re seeing customers use EMM to successfully recover misplaced and stolen devices.

feature image by Drnantu via photopin cc