BYOD Disaster Scenarios
Everyone
seems to be jumping on the Bring Your Own Device bandwagon, but it's a bumpy
ride. There are many ways to fall off and get a bloody nose (or worse). As the
BYOD reality catches up to the hype, here are very real disaster scenarios.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
(This phrase added throughout by Doug Schuble, RCS Communications.)
From employee lawsuits to the rising
costs to compliance failures, the road to BYOD is wrought with pitfalls. Not all of them are
as obvious, either. A widening trust gap between employer and employee can go on
unnoticed until it's too late. Or zombie phones tucked away in desk drawers may be feasting
on your mobile budget. Beware BYOD's dark side.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Sneaky
Workers Rip-Off Employer
Left unchecked, workers can take advantage
of your BYOD program. They can rack up thousands of dollars in overseas
charges. They can expense entire family plans, upgraded phones and termination
fees. They can sign up for maximum data plans.
A tech company with 600 workers, for
instance, paid $300,000 over budget in the first year of its BYOD smartphone
program. "It was just outrageous," David Schofield, partner at
Network Sourcing Advisors, a mobile consultancy that helped the tech company
rein in costs, told CIO.com.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Out
of Compliance
When companies let employees access
data on personal devices, there's a real chance that they're breaking the law.
A recent TEKsystems survey found that 35 percent of IT leaders (such as CIOs,
IT vice presidents and directors) and 25 percent of IT professionals (such as
developers, network admins and architects) are not confident that their organization's BYOD policy is
compliant with data and privacy protection acts, HIPAA, Dodd-Frank or other
government-mandated regulations.
TEKsystems adds: Failure to comply
with federal regulations can result in severe consequences, such as fines,
probationary periods of oversight by federal agencies and criminal penalties up
to and including imprisonment.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
The
Productivity Problem
BYOD promised to make employees
happy and more productive. After all, they could use mobile gadgets of their
choosing for work and would carry those gadgets practically all the time,
meaning that they'll be working in the evenings and on weekends. Worker
productivity was supposed to spike. Then some companies saw workers slack off
by using their gadgets to check Facebook and play Angry Birds at work. This led
to a few apps landing on the infamous BYOD blacklist.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Out
of the Network, Into the Cloud
Speaking of BYOD blacklisted apps,
some of the most hated ones--at least by CIOs--are cloud storage service
offerings such as Dropbox. Confidential corporate data can find its way
into these consumer repositories and out of the reach and purview of IT.
An employee can whip out his BYOD
smartphone, take a picture of a whiteboard or a screen shot of an important
document and save the image in Dropbox, and there's nothing IT can do about it.
If your company supports BYOD, you can bet there's corporate data in a consumer
cloud service.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Expense
Reports Explosion
BYOD smartphones were supposed to
save companies boatloads of money, because they no longer had to pay for
company-issued BlackBerrys. But cost savings have been derailed by hidden
costs. One of the worst offenders: processing BYOD expense reports.
Last year, Aberdeen Group came out
with a scathing report that mobile BYOD costs about 33 percent
more than a company-owned mobile device approach. BYOD stipends will ultimately
lead to more expense reports, says Aberdeen, and a single expense report costs
about $18 to process.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Text
Messaging Theft
Let's face it: Some employees are just
bad seeds who want to take confidential information before fleeing to a
competitor. With BYOD smartphones, it's a lot easier for them to get away with
it. These "bad leavers" swipe and send data in text messages, which
are nearly impossible to track.
"Text messaging appears only on
the phones and nowhere else on the corporate network," says Paul Luehr, managing director at Stroz Friedberg,
adding, "It's increasingly common to see [bad leavers] text messaging
their buddies across town and conveying private or valuable information that
way."
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Lawsuit
1: Privacy
Let's say your team of lawyers put
together a solid BYOD user policy, one that pretty much doesn't give an
employee much expectation of privacy. You're covered, right? Don't be too sure.
Managers need to be well-trained on the BYOD user policy, too.
In the case of City of Ontario vs.
Quon, police sergeant Jeff Quon and others sued the city alleging violation of
their constitutional rights because personal messages on a department-issued
pager were audited and led to Quon's firing. While the Supreme Court ultimately
sided with the auditors, one of Quon's superiors verbally assured him that
messages would not be monitored, thus igniting a controversy over the
expectation of privacy.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Lawsuit
2: Overtime
A TEK serve survey found that 63
percent of IT leaders believe BYOD is very effective in increasing employee
access for work-related purposes. While this is great for salaried workers,
problems arise with hourly ones.
Case-in-point: A lawsuit in a
federal court in Chicago claims that the city owes some 200 police officers
millions of dollars in overtime back pay because officers were pressured into
answering work-related calls and emails over department-issued BlackBerrys
during off-hours. While this particular case doesn't involve BYOD, there's no
question BYOD blurs the line even more between work life and personal
life.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
The
Widening Trust Gap
BYOD was supposed to bring people
together. Employees could use technology of their choosing, and IT could shake
the naysayer moniker. Then the relationship got a little dicey when IT asked
employees to sign a draconian BYOD end-user policy that makes short shrift of
an employee's expectation of privacy.
Only three out of 10 employees
completely trust their employee to keep personal information private, according
to a MobileIron-commissioned survey of 3,000 workers. The flip side is that the
rest aren't so sure. And a widening trust gap can quickly escalate from head-shaking
to finger-pointing to employee lawsuits claiming privacy rights violations.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Zombie
Phone Invasion
When companies transition to BYOD,
employees often turn in their corporate-issued phone in favor of their personal
one. Companies call the carrier to turn off the corporate-owned phone, and the
phone is thrown into a desk drawer somewhere. Amtel has found that in 10
percent of the cases, the corporate-issued phone becomes a "zombie
phone" that's thought to be dead but still being billed by the carrier.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
Image courtesy Thinkstock
REASONS TO USE TWO-WAY RADIOS RATHER THAN SMART PHONES OR BYODs:
Media
on Line 1
What's the worst thing that could
happen to a company in a BYOD world? That's easy. It’s getting a call from a
local news reporter asking about compromised data on a lost or stolen BYOD
smartphone or tablet.
"If we end up on the front of
the Fresno Bee because an attorney left his phone at the bar... the damage to
your reputation could literally be millions of dollars," CIO Darin Adcock
at law firm Dowling Aaron
told CIO.com.
By Tom Kaneshige, CIO Tom Kaneshige has
been covering business and technology in Silicon Valley for two decades. As
senior online writer at CIO.com, Tom covers Silicon Valley culture, BYOD and
consumer tech in the enterprise.
