How to cope with BYOD
- Article 30 of 33
- SC Magazine, October 2012
The cloud, mobile device management and virtualisation are riding to the rescue of organisations faced with the inevitability of 'bring your own device'. By Rob Buckley
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Many virtualisation vendors, such as VMware and Citrix, are embracing mobile devices, so users can download free viewer apps and authenticate in the same way as other users without additional layers of security to go through. Indeed, the latest versions of some virtualisation tools include access and authentication gateways of their own so that no additional, mobile-specific technologies need to be added.
How well virtualisation works with mobile devices usually depends on the organisation and its employees. Some may not like using a Windows desktop on an iPad, for example - a reverse of the usual situation where a corporate application accessed on an iPad might not work well or at all, something that also needs considering by CIOs when rolling out a mobile device policy.
"The worst thing I ever saw was Windows 7 on an iPhone," says O2 head of innovation Andy Roberts. "That's crazy. It's got to be a native experience. If you're using an iPad, it has to look like an iPad. I didn't want a clunky virtual desktop."
According to Information Security Forum (ISF) global vice president Steve Durbin, many executives will also "swear blind" that they absolutely need to have data on their own devices, and not just on a virtual desktop. What's more, virtualisation will only work when there is unhindered internet access, which might not always be the case.
Morten Grauballe, European vice president of corporate development and strategy at Red Bend Software, points out that performance can be an issue for virtualisation software hosted on top of an OS. His company is going to pilot a virtualisation environment for Android phones that will run parallel to the OS through a hypervisor. "When CIOs hear about that, they're happy, because it's just what they're used to on the server," he says. That option, however, won't be available until next year at the earliest, and won't be available for iPhones, BlackBerrys et al, making it a better bet for corporate roll-outs of devices that employees can also use as their own, rather than BYOD.
Another problem with virtualisation is potential shortcuts around the environment. If users are able to access corporate emails outside the virtual environment, that's at least one potential avenue of data loss that will need to be mitigated against separately, perhaps by deploying document-level security, suggests Terry Greer-King, UK managing director at Check Point.
So virtualisation is certainly not a panacea. Indeed, a hybrid approach between virtualisation and segregated devices could be necessary. "You need flexibility in the way you deploy that takes account of who it is, where they are and more," says Fortinet director of strategic solutions Graeme Nash.
Thanks to its advantages, BYOD is likely here to stay, and with the right technical precautions, it's possible to implement it securely and effectively. But without those measures, it can prove a liability and potential area of difficulty for compliance and many other areas of corporate responsibility.
Nevertheless, says the ISF's Durbin: "You need to go into this with your eyes open. BYOD is never going to be 100 per cent secure. You're almost kidding yourself if you think MDM is going to make everything hunky-dory. By their very nature, mobile devices are designed for consumers, not for corporate use, so they bring with them inherent risk."
Case study: Colt
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