The concept of BYOD (bring your own device) is becoming increasingly popular in the workplace.  With rising financial and budgetary constraints, companies are often requesting employees to supply their own devices to work.  This, however, introduces serious security risks to company networks and data.

Research conducted by Harris Interactive Poll reported that more than 80% of employees use some kind of personal portable devices for work related functions.  These devices include not only smartphones and tablets, but also laptops and flash drives.

The research’s reported a number of “unsafe computing” practices.  The key findings included:

• More than 30 percent of employees using their own devices for work have connected to the company via a ‘free’ or public network.
• Employees often allow family or friends, access to their devices.  Thus giving these individuals access to the company network and proprietary data.
• 37 percent of those surveyed do not use basic security features on their devices, such as auto-lock mechanisms.  This gives easy access to strangers, should the device be stolen or forgotten in public areas.

The study further highlighted that two thirds of these organizations who permit the use of these personal devices, have not even implemented any BYOD security policies.

Businesses rapidly need to enforce effective BYOD polices to avoid compromising company networks and confidential data.  Some suggestions include:

• Train employees on good security practices
• Enforce password protected auto-locking on personal devices used for work
• Implement clear, written policies on data access and enforce security measures on personal devices used for work.

The below infographic highlights some of the key findings of the study, ‘BYOD security is no LOL matter‘ http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/byod-are-businesses-prepared/15936?tag=content;feature-roto