Dual-persona solutions bring balance to BYOD

Whether based in Paris, France or New York, today's information worker is likely to own several sophisticated connected devices - smartphones, tablets and laptops - and to want to use these for both personal and professional purposes. Increasingly, corporate IT departments are obliging these always-connected colleagues, though not without some serious reservations.

The growing BYOD adoption worldwide, including Asia Pacific, is a reflection of its business potential. Productivity, profits, agility and job satisfaction can increase when employees are allowed to remotely access corporate networks, applications and data using personal technology.

IT managers balance mobile enablement with organization policies

Even though BYOD saves IT hardware purchasing costs, and introduces devices that are often newer and more sophisticated than the corporate IT budget would allow, BYOD can carry significant policy and compliance risk. Those responsible for IT and information security grapple with difficult questions, such as:

• What is the best way to provide secure access to corporate resources while protecting corporate data and applications, while maintaining employee privacy? Can the IT administrator suspend access to business content when required, with all valuable and sensitive corporate data removed from the employee's device?

• How do organizations know the data usage of business determined-applications on a personally-owned device? How does the organization pay for business-related usage on the device?

• What are the organizational compliance and governance implications of BYOD? How can the company conform to its compliance and governance obligations and help protect the intellectual property and privacy of clients and partners when corporate and personal data is comingled on staff members' devices, where it might be lost or stolen?

• What policies allow the organization to cost-effectively manage multiple devices and platforms without frustrating users and damaging productivity? What does it take to convince users to improve their security behavior on devices that hold valuable corporate data?

Organizations at various stages on the BYOD continuum

The gulf between the security concerns of IT leaders and the aims of the executives who see an opportunity to harness a new source of corporate value often presents a challenge, but BYOD is a growing phenomenon that appears to be here to stay.

The continuum of BYOD adoption today spans organizations that prohibit access to corporate data by personal mobile devices to those that allow access, with or without restrictions, or that have no BYOD policy at all.

Three ages of BYOD deployment

Previously, one of the solutions to the dilemma of BYOD deployment was to deploy full device management and security protections to employee-owned devices. This approach would insist that employees allow the installation of remote lock and wipe software on their devices, which would be used to safeguard the data on a lost or stolen device and, if necessary, to wipe the device entirely.

These mobile device management (MDM) mechanisms could be burdensome for the IT team and unsatisfactory for workers who owned and were personally responsible for their device.

Containerization emerged as another solution, as a complement to existing MDM solutions being used to manage corporate-owned devices. In this scenario, the IT team secures corporate data in an encrypted container on an employee-owned device. This type of solution allows the IT team to authorize which employees may access business data and how these users can access corporate data and sanctioned applications.

Container solutions could also be embedded in the mobile device's operating system (OS), using hypervisors to run two separate instances of the OS and the applications that run on it, although this may have a negative effect on performance, requiring device-specific capabilities and manufacturers to support integration, thus limiting the essence of what BYOD is meant to represent.

It is now possible for employees to separate personal and work applications and related data on their device through dual-persona solutions, such as AT&T Toggle. Developed to meet today's demands for BYOD, dual-persona solutions provide more power, choice and convenience to the device-owner while helping to protect the corporate workspace.

The author is Sundhar Annamalai, executive director, Advanced Mobility Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions