Safeguard Your Company Data With Proper Balance Between BYOD & Physical Security

In today’s mobile technology era, many organizations are adopting BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concept to stay connected with the employees within the organization. Enterprises are allowing employees to take their own devices in order to access the company resources.

Today, organizations have learned a few important lessons from high education, apart from recruiting and retention. They understand how BYOD and mobility enterprisesolutions can help them achieve their business goals and objectives on the go. The days are gone when organizations were choosing corporate-issued BlackBerry as organizations no longer have to purchase computing resources if prospective employees willing to use their own devices within the enterprise.

Of course, mobility solution increases productivity of the employees within an organization. But there is something that has become a major concern for the enterprises adopting the mobility trend, and that is SECURITY.

Today, users read their emails, note things during the meetings, modify spreadsheets or access company contacts with the help of their own personal devices, which are technically not owned by the organization. There is no denying that it will provide ample access to the employees to the information, but sometimes employees store such corporate details or property of the business in their mobile. However, at the same time the device generally stores personal information as well as applications, which imposes a huge security threat for the organizations. But what’s the connection with Physical Security???

Well, there is a connection between mobile apps and physical security. Within a very short time span security industry has embraced mobile computing application development and extended operation capabilities of their systems with the mobile devices. Earlier in the 2010, the manufacturers were in the development of access control systems that use digital keys embedded within the mobile devices to open the doors.

However, mobile technology plays a key role for a major reason: How many times has an employee left their badge at home compared to their mobile phones? In addition to this, with the help of intrusion detection and alarm systems in the Smartphone devices, users can now easily arm, disarm, view logs and recover notifications of intrusion from their mobile devices itself. While BYOD trend of using such physical security applications can help improve security a lot more effective, efficient and safe, the mobile technology can significantly improve the risk for employees.

You can utilize NFC (New Field Communication) protocol, which enables devices to share data when in proximity with other devices. You may have seen commercials for the Smartphones that showcase people bumping their devices together in order to transfer data like images and contact information. The same technology can be used by the card-readers receive a digital key that is assigned to an employee's mobile phone. That key is stored in a proprietary application from the access control manufacturer, which was installed on the mobile device. 

NFC is an open standard, which was ratified by the IEEE 2008. But it is not supported by all the mobile manufacturers. One of the most popular Smartphone iPhone is not supporting it. However, you can purchase a case that is NFC-enabled if you’re a die-hard fan of Apple.

You can interface mobile device with the other physical security systems with the help of Application Programming Interface…! However, there are a lot of other ways you can maintain a great balance between the BYOD and physical security.