The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) era is here, posing a higher level of data security risk to enterprises. CIOs are faced with balancing the needs of workers to be more mobile and have more choice with the needs of the enterprise to protect its data regardless of the delivery channel. Here are five areas that CIOs need to keep in mind while evaluating data management solutions in the BYOD era
CAIRO, Egypt, 13th February 2015: Data
protection has always been a challenge, even when data flow was, more or less,
confined to a closed network system. Now, we have the BYOD (Bring Your Own
Device) era in which your employees and contractors basically feel they should
be able to use whatever device they want to create information, share it and
retrieve it at will. It makes previous risk mitigation issues look relatively
simple. The challenge and potential for risk will only increase. IDC forecasted
that by 2017, the number of global workers bringing their own smart phones to
work will reach 328 million, up from the estimated 175 million workers doing so
in 2014.[1] Company-purchased smart
phones are also on the rise, with an anticipated 88 million in use by 2017, up
from an estimated 69 million in 2014.
Tablets,
too, are on a fast trajectory. Forrester Research reports that by 2017, nearly
one in five tablet purchases will be made directly by companies. That equates
to roughly 68 million tablets flooding the workplace.[2] The numbers tell the story: BYOD and the
flexibility it gives our highly mobile workers are here to stay. Happy as
employees may be to use mobile devices, it presents an enormous challenge to
CIOs who must set new standards and policies across the enterprise to protect
data and mitigate risk. CIOs are working with their IT teams to put into place
systems, rules and technology that will allow workers the computing freedom
they desire, at the same time ensuring data is safe, retrievable and to the
best possible extent, risk free. Nizar Elfarra, Pre Sales Director at CommVault
outlines five areas that CIOs and IT
managers in Egypt need to be watchful about when deciding the best data
management and protection solution:
Enabling File Synchronization
Enterprises
view BYOD as a way to increase productivity, and that means enabling work to
continue without delay across the different devices used by employees. They
need a file synchronization solution that meets data security objectives while
enabling data access, whether the data was created at an office desktop, or on
a laptop at a different location. While employees send files to the cloud or
put them on USB drives, assumedly to work on later at home, often they may not
be able to return to the file and wind up working on it again, back at the
desktop or laptop. This creates risk because business data now resides in a
potentially unsecured location and different versions of the files exist in
different locations. It’s critical to managing risk to be able to pull
different data sources into a single pool of protection, management and access.
Efficiently Protecting Data
As
employees use as many as three devices a day, data governance takes on more
complexity.
Even less sensitive data needs to be governed as files move across
devices,
and outside the enterprise, to suppliers and customers. It is important to have
a solution that helps to prevent data loss by enabling efficient, rapid and
transparent
backup
for business-critical data on laptops and desktops through deduplication,
opportunistic scheduling, bandwidth throttling, flexible policy definition,
and
the intelligence to run a backup only if a file has changed.
Easily Accessing Files While Mobile
Employees
will no doubt expect the same quick access to files while using a
mobile
device as they have from their laptop or desktop. The solution needs to be able
to deliver data portability and self-service access to a secure, personal data
cloud so that they are able to access their files from virtually anywhere, at
any time, and also protect files from their tablet or phones.
Fast eDiscovery
It’s
also necessary to be able to access and retrieve documents that have legal
and
compliance relevance, regardless of where they reside, without having to spend
a
lot of resources retrieving laptops from far flung locations. The solution needs
to have simplified administration and the ability to rapidly find key
documents. Chief Legal Officers (CLOs)
will thus be able to create legal holds and choose the best strategy earlier in
the audit or litigation process.
Dealing with Data on Lost or Stolen Endpoints
Data
breaches are becoming more prevalent these days. Employees’ increasing mobility
only adds more probability to these types of incidences. One of the major
enterprise concerns is the incidence of lost or stolen laptops. File encryption
is essential to preventing unauthorized access that can occur. Remote wipe can
be used to delete files and geo-location is a valuable tool in tracking lost
laptops. Techniques like IP address logging can be used to identify where a
laptop or desktop is located to determine if it has been lost or to help
recover it.The solution needs to allow administrators to set policies that
define granular encryption rules down to the file level.
BYOD’S NEXT FRONTIER
Like
it or not, CIOs and IT teams in Egypt are going to face even more complex
challenges as the mobility and BYOD trends continue to accelerate. To further
minimize data loss and
breach
risk, CIOs are looking at new ideas such as ‘geo-fencing’ in which an employee
can
only access certain data within a specified physical distance from a secure
building.
It
is a critical time in BYOD’s evolution as executives are examining ways to
advance
data
protection solutions that work in a mobile environment.
