The Top 5 Myths of BYOD

No matter the persuasive presentations, insightful surveys or confirmatory case-studies you’ve received, actually adopting BYOD often feels like a leap of faith. As a practice, it’s been around for over a decade, yet enabling employees to use personal devices for work purposes can feel new, unknown, and unnerving. 

A gut feeling is often a crucial ingredient in business decisions, so, if you’re considering BYOD, try not to let these top five myths steer it the wrong way.

Myth 1: Security Issues Mean the Payoff's not Big Enough

There’s no doubt that device security is more easily achieved when only corporate-owned devices are involved. After all, IT have a firmer control over which devices are available for use and what they're pre-loaded with when handed to an employee.

However, that certainly doesn’t mean that security can’t be achieved with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) – it just takes slightly more planning and thought. In fact, the very same security practices are typically used in BYOD, including: encryption, authentication, virus protection, network access controls, containerization technology, remote locks and data wipes. And, of course, policy management and enforcement. So, a coordinated and systematic effort is all that’s needed to ensure corporate data is effectively safeguarded in a BYOD program.

And as for the question of BYOD pay-off, a Cisco study provided a literal answer – finding U.S. companies can save $3,150 per employee by executing a comprehensive BYOD program. Alongside these impressive cost-reductions comes an increased level of employee productivity and satisfaction and decreased pressure on support teams. We discuss these advantages further in our recent post: What Are the Benefits of BYOD?

As a final point, the reality of today’s tech-driven world is that if you choose not to implement a BYOD program, employees will inevitably use their own devices for work anyway (more on that next). While sanctioned BYOD is controlled and secure, unofficial BYOD is an unsecure unknown.

Myth 2: You can Prevent BYOD in Your Organization

A Harvard Business Review survey of 300 companies discovered 50% contained employees who bring their own devices to work, while only 35% had policies allowing such behavior. That same study also revealed that even though the number of companies permitting employees to bring their own devices fell by 18% between 2013 to 2014, the number of employees who decided to use their own devices anyway continued to rise by 10%. And the number of employees using their own PCs actually doubled from 44% to 88%.

There are countless similar studies that all back-up the same simple fact – people are keen to use their own devices for work, and to try and stop them is both counter-intuitive and unrealistic. Businesses often feel they’ve started to “lift their heads out of the sand” when they've officially adopted BYOD.

And official adoption of BYOD is set to increase dramatically over the coming years, with a recent Gartner study predicting 75% of smartphones used in the enterprise will be BYOD by 2022, up from 35% in 2018.

Myth 3: Reimbursements are a Lot of Hassle for Everyone

Sometimes you'll hear an enterprise mobility manager, who is considering a BYOD program, say something like this:

A BYOD program is meant to save me money, increase security, and make my life easier. There are thousands of employees in this company – some we’ll want to adopt BYOD, some we won’t. Having to constantly track who’s adopted BYOD, what they’re owed, and set up payments is just one more thing I, or my employees, won’t have time for.

To be fair, any BYOD program that has staff taking time out of their day to fill in expense reports, which are later processed by the accounts department is causing unnecessary hassle and wasting precious time. But this isn't the only way.

The answer is to make payments straight to the carrier, crediting the member of staff’s account each time they’re billed. This automated process is quick to set up and can then just be left to run quietly in the background.

Myth 4: There’s no Real Incentive for Employees to Take Security Seriously

An oft-voiced concern of businesses considering BYOD adoption is that employees won’t really be motivated to take device security seriously. The reasoning given is that people are naturally more relaxed about their personal devices and that security is too dry a topic for people to really engage with.

It’s the job of a TEM vendor to allay these concerns. Writing BYOD policies with an easy-to-follow and friendly style is a good start. And critically, policies must explain why compliance is so valuable, because staff are more likely to comply if they see that it’s important.

But still, a well-written BYOD policy isn’t enough. Mobile device management (MDM) systems should be integrated with the BYOD solution and feature built-in compliance incentives to be most effective. For example, employee-reimbursement can be made dependent on policy-compliance, MDM enrolment and use.

Offering reimbursements, but governing them based on policy adherence, is a key best practice for BYOD programs. By balancing "carrot and stick", company objectives (regarding device security, for example) are more likely to be met. And, at the same time, adoption rates significantly improve because staff are incentivized sufficiently.

Myth 5: A BYOD Program Lets a Company Spy on their Employees

A Harris Interactive survey of 2,500 U.S. workers discovered that 80% of employees are concerned about employers seeing private information on their devices. And staff fears that their employer will suddenly become a Big Brother figure if they adopt BYOD are one of the biggest obstacles to implementing a program.

Yet, in reality, containerization technology is used in a BYOD program, i.e.  personal content and corporate information is partitioned. A BYOD solution does not enable employer access to personal data in any way, and it's important to underline an employee’s right to privacy in the policy document.

"Expectations of privacy" is one of the legal considerations we outline in our enterprise BYOD policy guide, in fact. In the article, we take a step-by-step, methodical approach to crafting a BYOD policy, paving the way for a program that's secure, popular, and saves you time and money.