These current, unprecedented, and challenging times are forcing the hands of many organizations. Worldwide, businesses are struggling to adapt to all-new working conditions, with companies having to accept remote working as the new normal.
For large companies, the transition isn’t always an easy one. It costs time and money to effectively implement a company-wide shift to remote working. However, there is a way to bridge the gap between the way your business currently operates and shifting to a remote environment while saving on cost – a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative.
Many organizations have struggled without a contingency, but a comprehensive BYOD policy can act as a stopgap during these times, helping you manage the transition to a new working environment. Having a plan in place isn’t just about being able to react as a business to a sudden change, but it’s also about finding ways to manage costs when demands are placed on IT in ways you haven’t seen before.
Your BYOD program can act as a way for your business to transition to working remotely while saving money and time. With an entire organization’s worth of employees suddenly accessing the internet from a variety of devices, both personal and company-issued, it’s important to ensure you have total visibility across your entire network.
How Your BYOD Program Helps the Transition to a Fully Remote Environment
BYOD gives your employees the freedom to use whatever means necessary to complete their work, making the process of adopting remote working that much less strenuous for your enterprise.
The key cost-saving advantage of utilizing a BYOD program during this period is that you don’t have to source and distribute a company’s worth of new devices. Employees can work from their own personal device while working from home. In these challenging times, a well-implemented BYOD policy can help reduce stress on already struggling IT departments by enabling the employees to work from their own internet connection and can deliver both cost and time savings.
Moving the majority of your workforce onto remote working at short notice sounds like a nightmare, but BYOD makes it easier by putting the freedom directly into the employees’ hands. However, the policy must be managed strictly in order for it to be beneficial to a business.
How to Manage Your BYOD Policy
There are a number of ways for you to properly manage your existing BYOD policy to ensure it best serves your business during an already trying time.
Make Sure the Policy Covers All Bases
Creating and enforcing a comprehensive BYOD policy is the best way to get the most out of utilizing BYOD for your business. The policy needs to protect your company, while also enhancing your employees’ experience when working from home.
Your BYOD policy should be simplified as much as possible to ensure compliance among your employees. Compliance matters include usage, and how the devices involved are to be used when corporate data is involved. Establish that clear divide between personal and corporate privacy, both to help reinforce security for corporate data but also to ensure employees that their privacy is still maintained when looking at personal data on their device.
Your reimbursement policy should also be included. When employees are having to work from home during these difficult times, your reimbursement policy should be made more intuitive to fit the situation.
Set Up UEM to Maintain Control and Security Over Data
BYOD delivers great freedom to your workers and enables them to work on any device they like. This frees up your business in many ways, saving you money on new devices and set-up in particular.
However, allowing employees to access potentially sensitive corporate data from their personal devices can lead to security issues. Consider the impact of an entire workforce accessing company information from possibly unsecured locations. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) gives you total visibility over your entire network, with analytics that can get right down to the individual user.
UEM allows you to mix both mobile device management and mobile app management to give you full control over your mobile environment. Using containerization technology, UEM enables your employees to switch between corporate and personal data on their own device without compromising security. Authorization tools means that restricted data is only seen by those you want to see it. Meanwhile, your enterprise manages an entire network of devices from a single location.
This helps reduce device management costs, but also improves onboarding – your employees already know how to use their devices, saving time and money. Giving your employees more control over how they work helps to improve job satisfaction and overall productivity, ensuring work continues smooth when people are operating remotely.
Utilize the Help of a MMS Vendor
The transition to full remote working is difficult enough without the stress of having to manage potentially hundreds of mobile contracts. Working with an experienced TEM vendor can relieve your company of that additional worry.
Utilizing a TEM vendor helps your business save time and money in the transition to remote working. Imagine the potential impact of employees being left to manage their own contracts and data usage across an entire ecosystem of devices. Instead, trust an experienced managed mobility services partner to implement and manage those changes across your global workforce.
A New Work Environment
A comprehensive BYOD policy can save your business time and money, while allowing your employees the freedom to complete their work their own way. Writing a BYOD policy that gives your employees that breathing room, while relieving your business of stress, is critical during these times.
Topics: BYOD
