Multiple sources are indicating a surge in businesses committing to a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy at work this year. This type of program has done well in the United States recently, and newer information from AT&T shows that companies will likely continue to allow employees to access business functions on their own electronics.
As the BYOD trend grows, enterprises will have to be more mature about the way they allow personal device use, especially if this potentially puts businesses at greater risk of a security breach. A ZDNet article recently spotlighted predictions from AT&T's vice president of security solutions, Andy Daudelin, who said that the potential for bad malware to increase will grow when the number of devices used in the workplace increases.
Part of the concern is the way that each individual device can act as a gathering point for all kinds of sensitive personal and work information from different sources. In a webcast quoted by the source, Daudelin said that a good BYOD setup needs an "end-to-end view" to work properly.
"A company can't be sure that the user has done everything required to keep that device secure for business users," he said. "On the flip side, users are very concerned about privacy." He also said that device proliferation is "where destructive malware really becomes an issue."
Tech Pro Research recently asserted that 60 percent of nearly 200 respondents currently allow BYOD policies. Nearly 80 percent of a sample group of 51 respondents said that they are mostly concerned with the possible implications of lax security as a reason for not adopting a BYOD strategy at all.
When a company has legacy mainframe screen-based applications, preparing for further use of individual devices requires a terminal emulator solution that is secure and easy to implement across devices using standard browsers.