You probably bought your smartphone in order to send SMS messages to or call friends, family, and business contacts. It was just a bonus that you could do other things with it, and even do some work related stuff on it as well. BYOD happened and IT departments had to live with the fact that they would need to ensure that the many devices used by their employees are secure. But here is the paradox: while securing mobile devices used for BYOD is the main concern, it seems that a smartphone’s main uses (calling and texting) is a problem.
What are the concerns of BYOD communications?
- Your employees are not using enterprise apps for enterprise messaging. Instead they use Skype, WhatsApp, and other consumer apps that are not wired for security and do not have the ability to archive messages. Both of these capabilities are vital for BYOD management. You need to protect corporate data and content that are being sent and shared on these consumer apps, as well as find an enterprise messaging solution that would allow you to log messages and attachments for audit purposes.
- Separate business from personal. In a BYOD device, corporate messages and content are mixed with personal content and messages. It would be a good idea to have a containerized solution that would isolate business content to use a separate workspace, so that it would be easy to get these data without having to go through the user’s personal content. It would be better if there was some way to easily remove the business workspace and load it to another device if the person resigns from his or her job. This will also help you ensure compliance to archiving and logging requirements, again without having to go through the employee’s personal content. That means that you can log all the business-related content such as business contacts, call and SMS logs, voice mail recordings, attachments and SMS messages and leave personal stuff alone.
- International roaming charges can get complicated. If your employee has to go on a business trip abroad, the company might be faced with skyrocketing long distance charges when the employee comes home. You can get around this with a virtual business phone number, which does not get charged with roaming charges. Plus, your employee may be reachable using the same phone number even when he or she is overseas. As such, your customers, your other employees would be able to reach him or her using just one number rather than having a separate roaming number.
- Personal phone number is kept private. With a virtual phone number, your employees can keep their personal phone numbers private, because what the client or outside suppliers can see are their virtual business phone number.
Implement BYOD right with Four Cornerstone. We offer Oracle consulting in Dallas, which can help you in implementing BYOD strategies for your business. If you are planning on using Oracle solutions, we also have a team of Oracle experts who could guide you in deploying, maintaining and operating Oracle solutions for your BYOD initiatives.
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