Forget BYOD – BYOA is going to give your IT Dept kittens

Rating: Bring Your Own App is the new black

As if Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) wasn’t bad enough, the latest industry trend – Bring Your Own App or BYOA, is going to give the Network Nasties [IT managers] kittens. Rather than utilising approved application which are supplied and managed by the IT department, employees are starting to download and utilise their own favourite apps for business purposes. The implications of such practices are serious for some industry sectors (such as financial institutions) which could find sensitive data floating around on employees’ iPads, BlackBerries and Android smartphones. Luckily, there is a way out of BYOA melt-down. Secure the data and the apps can look after themselves.According to a recent survey carried out on behalf of Good Technology, around 42 per cent of people already use the same phone at work that they employ for their personal activities.

So the problem isn’t going to go away even if the Network Nasties try to ban employees from running all non-official mobile apps.

It’s the data leakage that’s the problem. An employee could be working on a document which – if it fell into the wrong hands, resulted in the loss of corporate IP.

Security specialists, such as Good, are particularly concerned about the practice of employees storing corporate documents on cloud based services such as Dropbox.

How easy might it be for a hacker to break into an employee’s cloud drive?

Good, of course, advocates that corporates and bodies install proper security applications which would ensure secure app-to-app data transfers.

GoMobile News would also humbly suggest that the Network Nasties look very hard at ways to ensure that all the smartphones and tablets on their networks do at least have one mobile security app installed.

We suspect that this is an area where RIM may well enjoy an advantage because its BlackBerry Mobile Fusion server supports ActiveSync certificate-based authentication along with additional IT Policy controls.

If you are going to install any kind of mobile security app, then the one feature it needs to possess is ‘remote wipe’.

There are a multiple routes to ensuring this facility is installed on employees’ smartphones and tablets.

All decent security apps – such as avast!, offer this technology.

Another weapon is to keep employees aware of the dangers.

For example, circulate by email warnings that downloading a particular app to gain access to free content (games, ringtones, music tracks, etc) can introduce malware.

GoMobile News has a gut feeling that we’re going to hear a great deal about BYOA in future. Any Guest Posts on the subject are more than welcome.