BYOD and controlling remote devices on your network
by Alex
Posted on June 1, 2018 at 12:00 PM
Office practises are changing rapidly and its likely that staff will be bringing their own devices (BYOD) to the office, attaching devices to your network and accessing company data through them. Before you find that they have accidentally infected your network, used up all you WiFi, or downloaded data lets look at how you can control this trend and make it work for your organisation safely
Any solution that you decide on will need to work across multiple operating systems, as staff will have all types of devices running a multitude of operating systems, from Android, Linux, Apple as well as Microsoft Windows. Secondly not all of these systems will be up to date and secure with the latest antivirus. Thirdly you will be limited as to what you can enforce on these systems.
Firstly you to need to decide what level of security and practise you want to allow and the type of devices you will accept on premise. Without realising it you are probably already allowing remote devices onto your network such as smart phones using the office WiFi. You need a clear idea of the basic BYOD model you want your IT people to run and how they can safely administer it without fear that it will backfire. Do you want LAN access given out? Must all systems have an Antivirus? Can staff move company data to their private computers? any many more questions need to be asked. It does not matter if these are all negative as there are plenty of IT solutions in the market to suit lots of BYOD solutions, but you have to be clear of what the downside of your actions entail.
Secondly do your paper work and make sure you have this as part of your IT policy which everyone signs up to. This will allow you to enforce any policy you roll out and makes everyone aware that there are rules which they have signed up to. There is nothing like a bit of legal paperwork to keep everyone honest and willing to accept basic security features, remember they can always use the decaying pc in the corner !
Ok now you have everything in place to roll out a BYOD solution, what do you go for? Lets start with server access solutions. The most secure direction is always remote desktop solution and possibly with a simple HTML5 interface such as Awingu as this limits the interaction your staff have with their own Operating system and is totally independent. It is highly secure as data cannot be transferred unless you allow it. (At the end of the day remember they have signed a contract and they can always just photograph pages! Trust is needed)
VMware Airwatch and Microsoft intune are very popular services, both of these require apps to be installed on the client devices through which you access the corporate data - you have a wide variety of administrative control over the apps used, dataflow monitoring, DPM security, MDM (mobile device management) If you are using the Microsoft Office 365 stack then Intune is definitely something to look into. These products offer complete BYOD and Mobile device solutions, so they will have quite comprehensive monitoring and control for mobiles and Ipads as well as laptops.
Alternatively if you are not looking for a licence based complete solution you can adopt a layered approach. In this scenario you would have some way to alert you to the different types of devices on the network and apply a rule depending on the scenario. Examples of this can be found in Cisco Meraki firewalls and Solarwinds monitoring solutions.
The team at Plum Networks Ltd have many tools and experience with BYOD, and controlling remote devices on a network. We have ranges of solutions that we can discuss with you, supply and manage.