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What are your thoughts on personal equipment “BYOD” in the work place for work related tasks… (please read on for background)

We have had a few new employee’s start this last week. Each employee gets a laptop (this particular user has an engineering grade laptop- it’s a little bulky but powerful and portable). A question was brought to me by said employee… “What’s the office wifi password so I can use my (personal) tablet and phone for email and to sync notes (evernote?) to my laptop?”

We currently have an “Office” and a “Guest” network (Guest is locked down of course).

We do not have any BYOD policy in place. If you have a company funded phone or laptop, I will gladly set it up for business.

I definitely see benefit to allowing a more-mobile opportunity to arise, but I’m afraid of the possible repercussions.

Would letting said user use the tablet and sync data between his laptop and his tablet be too much? Is using the Guest network okay? Would this cause a snowball effect to other users? Is there risk/liability?

What are your thoughts?

(Please move to the right group area if I’m posting in the wrong place)

42 Spice ups
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I’d say (and have said), “No.”

If you believe the equipment you’ve been issued is inadequate, speak to your supervisor about getting company-issued equipment. Then I can install appropriate software to monitor, protect, and track everything that happens on that devices, as is my responsibility.

I’ve had people very upset because they want to sync their Blackberries with Outlook. Tough.

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If you do not have an official BYOD policy, then he must be relegated to the guest network not just for network security but also for your and your company’s liability protection if that person’s personal device is compromised in any way. If it’s stolen or lost with sensitive data, and you don’t have authorization or permission to go in and wipe it, that’s a problem that goes beyond just your engineer’s “convenience.”

While you may not be able to stop your user from syncing his tablet to his laptop himself, you don’t have to authorize it or even support it. Yes, there’s lots of risk/liability involved.

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Everyone here uses our guest network for BYOD purposes.

That’s a good point. Not sure how my boss would feel about us having to remotely wipe his iphone if it ever got stolen, but that would need to be done as he does have access to sensitive data on it. That’s not even related to him using our wifi so much as just logging in to our cloud via his iphone.

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We have a lot of BYOD here. Mostly, it’s little babies (well-educated scientists with one or more PhDs) who seem to think we spend all day spying on them, viewing their screens, reading their emails, and watching where they surf. Our “policy” is, if you work here we’ll give you tools by way of standard installs – including AV software – but you’re on your own. We do not offer any type of support for your device or whatever it is you are doing with it, and we don’t care what happens to any data you lose. We also have “Private” and “Guest” WiFi. Nobody has the password for the Private WiFi, and if you choose to use the Guest WiFi you are sandboxed. If you allow BYOD, you will have to support it to some extent, so if you make the decision to turn the other cheek (as we have) be sure to have someone very high up on the food chain back you up. You need to be able to say, “If you have a problem with the CEO’s policy talk to him/her.”

Sidenote: Diggin’ the nautilus!

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BYOD with no policy or plan in place is not a door you want to open.

It’s great they want to do more and are willing to use their own toys but until you have a plan for byod and direction from management. Politely decline from allowing it.

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Agreed, Cap’n. But users get pissy about stupid stuff – I actually had to deal with a “thing” that eventually involved HR when Dr. Sh*t4Brains filed a complaint that IT was censoring his email by using anti-spam/anti-virus tools at the gateway. Seriously?

Sometimes there are no words, ya know?

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Not a company owned device? Not on the company network. I had this “debate” with the pissy new sales dick here… he tried to go over my head and behind my back to get the owner to make me comply to his petty demands, but management told him “that’s the policy”. I thoroughly enjoyed watching him slink out of the owner’s office, downtrodden, after they explained that what I told him was correct, and in the future he must comply with all policies.

Nobody else here has ever questioned that policy.

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Wonder if Pissy New Sales Dick and Dr. Shit4Brains are related… Twins?

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Does Dr. Shit4brains talk incessantly and peddle his kids’ fundraising BS via company email too?

(I can’t really complain anymore, since sales dick is now scared of me and will only communicate by using one of the developers as a proxy. WIN.)

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Depends where the data is and what apps you use.

Dumping personal devices directly on the internal LAN and using file shares and stuff like that is a no go.

If you can provide a RDS portal or something where you can have personal devices on a guest Wi-Fi totally isolated from your internal LAN and they can only use RDS through a proxy that’s a viable option I think.

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HAHAHA!! Talks all the time. Married, but no kids… Maybe Sales Dick can sell him one? He doesn’t talk to me because I don’t have a PhD, so I’m thankful to be off his email list :wink: Speaking of email, I’m so so so very happy I don’t deal with email anymore. I overheard today’s trauma: He set up a rule in OWA to forward all company email to his GMail account because it’s “better” and he’s annoyed because when he sends email it comes from his GMail address.

Gotta wonder what they teach in PhD school, eh?

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No BYOD policy in place -no BYOD. No exceptions.

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Imagine a grumpy cat meme… and then you know my reply…

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(Thanks for the like of the picture!)

I appreciate the feedback so far, does anyone have any success or horror stories related to the topic?

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That’s a big fat NO! So many problems could come from that. For one, the next thing you know you’ll have the entire engineering department (assuming he’s in engineering since he has an engineering grade laptop) and it will only become worse from there.

Not including any company data that is on his phone will be a liability. What happens if it gets stolen or lost? To me that has trouble written all over it. Just stick to your guns. No is no.

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We just implemented this about a month ago. It is not known that we do it, but if people ask we will set them up. We changed the wifi password and encryption type of the wifi and this prompted us to put a BYOD policy in place as users made a request to join after.

To join the wifi IT has to approve this as well persons superior/manager before doing so. We make the determination and justification if the device is really needed on the wifi or not.

If you implement this make sure it on the copy policy to cover yourself and the company. Make sure they know you are not liable if anything happens to the device.

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I hate it. How do you enforce policies on a personal device without running into legal issues at some point? MDM’s are an additional control mechanism that you have to implement and maintain and you have to walk the fine line between security and privacy and neither is really protected very well. You expose critical business infrastructure to folk’s personal devices and the habits that go along with them.

You aren’t saving money, really, you are shifting it around.

I do think that technology may improve to the point of making us wonder why we ever did things differently but we are not anywhere close to that. We have poorly planned and constructed mechanisms that are buggy and flaky, depending on who you buy them from, and we have to pay through the nose for them. The “free” or “cheap” stuff is so limited that you can’t really use them to enforce policy, except at a high level.

My biggest problem is privacy. People want their cake and they want to eat it to. As things stand now, I don’t believe BYOD is a tenable business model. It can be, if done right, but that appears to be the exception and not the rule, especially in smaller orgs.

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Bring your own death? LOL I’m not a huge fan if there is no policy and if you don’t have a GOOD MDM. The biggest issue I have is end users cause more issues on there own devices then if you hand them a unit that only functions for company purposes. As for computers, once again I don’t see it as a good idea. If you can control more you can eliminate issues better.

BYOD started because someone didn’t want to work at WORK! Sorry, you have a job, don’t be dumb and do it. I’m not here to make your life more fun, just productive!

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No horror stories due to the fact that BYOD has been a NO from day one. Mine as well call it BYOV… v for virus

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