BYOD Costs : What are the BYOD Risks?

Michael Patterson / Uncategorized / , , , , / 3 Comments

What are the annual BYOD costs? From what I read, the annual company cash BYOD benefits  from smart phones, tablets and the like ranges from $300 to $1,300 per employee, depending on the employee’s job role.  Using this information, 1000 employees could lead to a $100,000 benefit to a company’s bottom line but, not so fast! 

On the other hand, the Aberdeen Group found that a company with 1,000 mobile devices spends an extra $170,000 per year, on average, when they use a BYOD approach.   With this additional information, it appears that a company could be looking at $70,000 annual loss? 

BYOD Concerns

Sure, companies need to have BYOD Policies, but what are the other real BYOD concerns?  I think they are two fold:

BYOD Traffic

BYOD Traffic or rather what employees are doing with their smart phones on the network is certainly a management concern.  What solution does your company have to find out what percent of the traffic is work vs. personal use?  A solution that combines data from a NetFlow capable switches with Mobile IAM is now available.  Notice the ‘dstNacOS’ column in the image below.

This is a reporting solution that tells you exactly how many iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, Virtual Machines, etc. that are on the network and how much traffic the individual, type or groups of devices are causing.  What are the top applications they run? What domains are they visiting?  You can find out!

BYOD Security

BYOD Security is another concern.  Since many BYOD operating systems aren’t equipped with antivirus software, a “wait for infection” approach is being taken by most companies.  Aside from the obvious proactive security measures, lets not forget about a couple very effective reactive measures:

  • Flow Setup Throttling should be configured to limited the traffic from an infected machine that starts exhibiting suspicious network behavior
  • IP Host Repuation should be monitored on all flows.  Communication to nefarious hosts should trigger events that take action.

BYOD Webcast

Want to learn more?  Sign up for the BYOD Security and Reporting webcast on Tuesday, June 5.