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BYOD Personal Privacy and IT Support Help Desk

BYOD personal privacy is causing a storm in the IT support services industry.  With more and more BYOD, many IT support services departments are getting caught in the middle of protecting corporate information while protecting employee privacy.

Many devices today are filled with personal information including documents and photos however it goes beyond that.  Devices now say a lot about the owner including browsing habits like dating sites or other private information regarding the person.

According to industry best practices a proper BYOD mobile management policy should allow a tech support professional to assist employees with apps and data without encountering any private information or not-safe-for-work (NSFW) material.

The problem here is that tech support departments are finding themselves looking not just at enterprise applications but also at private images and texts which they would rather not see or removing viruses by the same users visiting not-safe-for-work (NSFW) sites.

Here are some interesting facts on the scope of the issue with BYOD Personal Privacy:

  • 40% of tech support employees have had to remove malware from a device that has been infected from a not-safe-for-work (NSFW) website.
  • 33% had to remove malware caused by a malicious app that has been installed. Computerworld checked with several security experts, none of whom was particularly surprised by that statistic.
  • 50% of organizations surveyed acknowledged that their corporate and employee-owned BYOD and mobile devices could have been hacked without their knowledge.
  • 82% of infected sites are not suspicious such as not-safe-for-work (NSFW) website but rather sites that appear benign and smartphones are the biggest malware risk.

Today’s malware from not-safe-for-work (NSFW) websites is dangerous to business IT networks and BYOD is adding to the issue.  Not-safe-for-work (NSFW) websites are only a small fraction of the problems that users introduce to corporate IT infrastructure.

How do you protecting you IT infrastructure from BYOD?

The industry best practice is to create a corporate container to hold all business applications, including corporate email and Internet browsing.  When configured properly, IT support services professionals are able to isolate apps and data in the container from personal information.  The corporate container includes corporate email applications, Web browsers and many other applications.

On an employee level, businesses should be sure to update their policies to include BYOD.

 

365 iT SOLUTIONS is a leading IT consulting firm in Toronto. We provide industry leading Managed IT ServicesIT Support ServicesIT Outsourcing ServicesTech Support Services and Cloud Services.

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