The widespread use of personal devices such as smartphones and tablets in our daily lives has driven many businesses to embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) culture. In fact, according to a Cisco study report, 89% of organizations globally have adopted BYOD in some manner. The use of mobile devices to access company servers began years ago when IT departments began providing important personnel with mobile handsets such as BlackBerry.

But now that the world has shifted to work from home and hybrid work culture, the trend of BYOD is even extending its own branches.

Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is a trend in which employers enable employees to bring their own gadgets to work, such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets, to be used for business-related activities. Employees like the BYOD trend because it gives them a sense of freedom and flexibility that they may not have with company-provided devices.

BYOD is the polar opposite of the traditional model in which companies provide their employees with work devices, often known as 'Here's Your Own Device (HYOD).' While this BYOD trend offers cost savings to the company, it does come with a bunch of issues, including a higher risk of security and legal compliance concerns.

So, should you welcome the trend or step carefully and be mindful of potential risks? Let us discuss the pros and cons of BYOD.

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Pros of Using Personal Devices at Workplace

• Employees prefer to bring their own devices to work. They are acquainted with them. They have all of the apps they require and have them set up in the way they prefer. Employees who are allowed to use their own device at work are happier, more productive, and have higher morale, according to studies.
• Allowing employees to use their own devices enables them to execute and finish tasks from anywhere, at any time, without requiring them to use company-owned equipment to access business documents and information. This level of ease also eliminates the need to email back and forth copies of papers to be saved in your workplace system after working on them from home. At the same time, a BYOD policy allows you to experiment with new solutions because you are not limited to a single type or brand of device.
• Furthermore, employees no longer have to waste time becoming acquainted with a new gadget or learning how to utilise company-owned devices. This enhanced efficiency can lead to more work being completed in less time, which is obviously a big benefit for companies.

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Cons of Using Personal Devices at Workplace

• The most serious concern associated with using personal devices at work is the high security risk. Employee devices cannot be assumed to have the same level of security as company-owned hardware. They may even not update the operating system and antivirus on their laptop or phone on a regular basis, or password protect their devices, a basic requirement to protect the device from malware or malicious threats. If an employee's device is lost or stolen, this opens the door to data breaches and security vulnerabilities.
• Using personal devices in the workplace could also bring technical difficulties. Perhaps some of them use a different operating system than the one that your technical support team is most familiar with. Your employee’s personal gadgets might be old, slow or may be the existing program as used in the organisation does not support them.
• There may also be a concern about employees using personal devices at work to access social media or other personal apps. It's difficult to control social media use when employees are expected to use personal devices at work all the time. Such distractions might impact employee’s productivity.

Another significant concern is a lack of monitoring, which is defined as the inability of IT departments to track and restrict user access to corporate and private networks. Furthermore, troubleshooting can be a huge issue if individuals access a multitude of infrastructure platforms and technologies with their devices. This can breed a serious issue of employee hardware non-compliance with organizational software and apps.

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How Zaperon Correlates with Using Personal Devices in Workplaces

Security risk is one of the most serious difficulties in administering the BYOD structure in workplaces. Employees can take critical data from their organizations on their devices when they leave the organization. With no or few limits on how these devices can be used, such sensitive data is at risk of being revealed or leaked. If a device with critical company data falls into the wrong hands, it can be quite damaging, both financially and for the reputation of the organisation.

Although using personal devices at work poses substantial hurdles for IT staff, the underlying notion is compelling enough for any organization to plan for its adoption. Hence, the need for data protection, network access control, and device management to alleviate security concerns with BYOD structures takes center stage.

Zaperon understands the changing needs of businesses, while the ecosystem copes with security concerns encompassing personal devices at the workplace. Our passwordless zero trust security model designed for the WFH and hybrid environments keeps a firm hold on organizational security without restricting the employee flexibility to work from their own devices. Our cloud native zero system enforces security, authorizes application access for every application, and mitigates security threats.

Consider using Zaperon’s Zero Trust Security Model if you want to boost the efficiency of your workplace operations. Our platform will assist you in taking advantage of the use of personal devices in the working structure while minimizing potential disadvantages.