AppCentral Blog

BYOD Restrictions

John Dasher

Is it appropriate to draw restrictions around BYOD at your business?

There’s no denying that BYOD has dramatically changed the way that work is done – whether it be inside or outside of the office. Employees around the country have leveraged the power of their own personal mobile devices to afford them nearly 24-hour connectivity. But it seems nearly every month or so there is a new update, either to software or to hardware that makes older devices more obsolete and difficult to manage. As technology continues to evolve, you’ll need to consider whether to impose limitations on your BYOD policy.

Now, if you’re worried about your employees using mobile devices, you probably shouldn’t have a mobile policy in the first place. But there’s nothing wrong with drawing a few base rules around mobile usage in the workplace. It’s fair to say that you don’t want to support 4-year old technology, so limiting BYOD to devices and/or platforms that have been updated in the last 12-18 months can go a long way in alleviating any potential security or compatibility issues down the road. Plus, with the ease of over-the-cloud updates to most mobile platforms these days, it’s more than likely that most of your employees already are using phones and operating systems that are current.

Limiting what devices or platforms you support under a BYOD program may sound restrictive, but it will pay off in the long run when you aren’t concerned with running your enterprise app on an OS that is potentially out of date and at risk. Furthermore, you can rest assured knowing that your proprietary information and other data stored on employee’s mobile devices isn’t vulnerable to security flaws or holes that can often pop up in older versions of operating systems.