BYOB is a good way to have a party. But BYOD is no party if it’s not set up well. What is BYOD? It stands for Bring Your Own Device. It’s the current trend in many work environments where people are bringing their smart phones, iPads, Kindles, iPods, and other personal electronic devices to work.
If a company has no policy or does not prevent it through technical means, people can connect their devices to their PCs or to the company’s internal WiFi network. This is a major information security risk because it can allow confidential data to be copied to a device, and enables hackers to connect to the company’s internal network via a device’s wireless interfaces.Instead of forbidding those devices, here at FAME we have decided to take the issue head-on and set up a safe way to give those devices Internet access without endangering our internal network. We have set up a WiFi network in our office that connects directly to the Internet without going through our internal network. That Wifi network has a password of course, which we only give out to employees and visitors. It connects to the Internet via our secondary Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is Comcast, and doesn’t affect the bandwidth on our primary ISP, which is AT&T. If you only have one ISP, you can control the bandwidth in other ways, such as installing a switch in between where you can adjust the speed of the connection.
In order to make sure that devices are only used on this WiFi network, we have configured our company PCs so these devices can’t be connected to a USB port. This can be done by setting a Group Policy in Windows Active Directory, or simply disabling the USB ports.
So now we have a friendly BYOD policy that is both secure and also keeps our employees happy!
