Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a movement that has transformed the way that companies do business. By allowing employees to provide their own machines, companies eliminate much of the cost and complexity involved in IT management.
One benefit of BYOD — and also mobile computing — is that it enables teleworking, where employees can work from anywhere and be close to their clients. This agility provides many advantages to businesses.
A similar trend is taking place, where companies that had once worked out of a central office, are fragmenting themselves and spreading out over a larger geographic area in order to access new markets.
Of course, all of these trends come with risks.
In the case of fragmented or distributed offices, there is often no trained IT personnel on-staff to perform the server and end-point (laptops/desktops) backups. Therefore, the daily backups are usually done by a junior employee who may not have a full understanding of proper data protection best-practices. This threat is even more
And this threat is even more pronounced with BYOD, where end-users may not know — or care — about securing their work machines.
That’s why measures need to be taken to ensure the security and privacy of corporate data when accessed from remote sites or external systems.
This is a deep and complex topic, with many different areas to cover.
But at the most fundamental level, companies must take measures to ensure that they maintain centralized control over all of their corporate intellectual assets. This means that — instead of trusting employees to back up their own machines — there should be a centralized backup plan that’s deployed across all work machines to perform automatic continuous backups of all work-related data.
Backups should also be automated for remote or fragmented offices, in such a way as to centralize data security and ownership while also eliminating the possibility of human error from the backup process.
If an employee leaves the company or loses their computer, it’s critical for ownership of this corporate data to remain within the company, so that it can easily be accessed and recovered.
For an example of why this is important, watch this short video.