While it’s convenient to incorporate personal devices into workplaces, Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) can be risky for companies. When not managed correctly, there is an increased risk of a corporate data breach. Devices with valuable corporate data can be lost, stolen, or hacked. Compromising customer information and internal business data can be disastrous.
We cannot mandate robust security policies on employees’ mobile devices because it raises privacy concerns. IT administrators require the employees’ consent to perform a complete wipe on a compromised device. The company’s perspective is not the devices but the confidential data that is more vital. BYOD may cause a conflict between privacy and security.
Containerisation: the ultimate solution for management
of BYOD
BYOD has good potential in the corporate world and cannot be banned, even with security risks. An essential factor in implementing BYOD is to ensure security without compromising employee privacy.
What is containerisation?
Containerisation is a concept that separates work and plays. Companies commonly benefit from containerisation technologies to coordinate the packaging up, isolation, and encapsulation of work data on separate segmented user-space devices. It enables business and personal applications and data to exist on a single device. However, the applications and the data will stay within their limitations. Containerisation establishes separate, encrypted containers on personal mobile devices, a secure area on the devices that keep the business data insulated from everything else on the device and lets the administrator manage only the data in the container, limiting corporate access to personal data. Data and applications in personal container space are kept separate and remain private.
Containerisation with effective compartmentalisation into work and personal workspace domains is a crucial data control mechanism for the users who can do anything they want on their side and the companies that can take over the other part. All the user and corporate data interactions take place in the container in the encrypted area.
Important advantages of containerisation
- Encryption – most containers utilise the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) based encryption and ensure that nobody can access the corporate data cannot from outside the container.
- Remote wipe – the targeted remote wipe is possible with container-based products. Selective wipe ensures that IT administrators wipe only corporate data (data on work container), whereas personal data is left untouched.
- Data leakage protection – companies can retain control over their data by strictly restricting data flow into and outside the container. IT administrators can implement strict security policies to control the container data flow with an MDM solution.
Containerisation and MDM
Today, companies can deploy containers with an MDM profile to allow containerisation, thus keeping the company focused on the corporate part of the devices instead of the entire device. Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions support containerisation keeping the IT focused on containerised apps inside the work containers. This resource-isolated contained environment makes all the required business apps readily available to the users, with enterprises having restricted communication or access to the underlying resources.
Conclusion
Deploying MDM technology with containerisation allows robust authentication and encryption and wiping corporate data from lost or compromised devices selectively, with the personal data remaining untouched. Enterprise wipe is also helpful when an employee working with his personal device leaves a company. The company that wants to remove the data from the business container can do so without eliminating any resources in the personal zone the device owner has stored on his device. Therefore, IT administrators can prevent personal applications from accessing corporate data. Users can be confident that the organisation won’t access the personal information they store on the device outside the container.
