BYOD Best Practices

Your employees are almost certainly bringing their own smartphones, tablets, and even laptops into your workplace. The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend delivers plenty of benefits, of course, including reduced capital costs and increased productivity. In fact, IT research giant Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of employers will not just allow, but require employees to supply their own devices. On the other hand, as we discussed a few months ago, the key to implementing a successful BYOD program is striking a balance between productivity and security.

Whether you're requiring BYOD or just allowing it, you need a strategy to manage it — in other words, tools and policies that lock down your employees' mobile devices enough to protect your data, but not so much that they can't do their jobs. 

Xantrion can help you tailor a BYOD strategy to meet your specific needs, but the first step is to understand what your needs are. Our new BYOD Best Practices guide will educate you about the most important issues in easy-to-understand terms so you can begin to make choices about your options.

Click here to read the guide, then give us a call to discuss how we can help you strike the right balance with your BYOD program.

Cybersecurity Recommendations from our Risk Mitigation Event

As underscored in our panel discussion on May 21 at the City Club of San Francisco, cybercriminals are getting much more sophisticated. The number of attacks keeps escalating, and that means as a business owner or manager you must be extra vigilant. The following is a summary of our panel’s recommendations for mitigating risk:

• Take a multi-disciplinary approach- financial, IT, audit, insurance, legal
• Follow your banker’s advice to prevent fund transfer fraud
• Technical controls only go so far; adversaries are using sophisticated social attacks so procedural defenses are just as important as technical defenses
• Review vendor agreements, in particular for insurance requirements and indemnity
• Get an audit so you can sleep at night and provide assurances to insurance carriers and business partners of good practice
• Consider a specific cyber insurance policy
• Discuss your Breach Response Plan with your lawyer before you have a data breach incident

We’ll continue to keep your informed about cybersecurity and the latest recommendations for protecting your organization from threats. If you haven’t done so already, consider subscribing to our newsletter- we cover information about cybersecurity regularly.