Employees are using their personal smartphones and tablets for work more and more. While this allows the employee to stay connected to work, even during "off hours," it can cause some issues if the gadgets are not properly secured. Those gadgets are prime targets for hackers seeking to access business data or confidential/trade secret information.
So, what do employers do? Well, as of now, there is a range of ways employers handle the situation. They either ban all personal gadgets for work use, require that the employee allow the employer remote access to the gadgets in order to allow the employer to wipe it clean, or do nothing (because they are not sure what to do).
What should employers do? This is a difficult question because it not only raises privacy and confidentiality issues, but it also implicates issues involving the need to allow a third party suing the company access to the employee's personal devices and questions about who owns the e-mail, work twitter account, or work facebook account, etc. Allowing employees to use personal gadgets rather than employer issued (and paid for) ones saves companies substantial costs. Not to mention that employees do not want to tote around two phones, two laptops, or two tablets (one work issued and one personal). Of course, the use of a personal gadget for work means that the employee will also access personal social media sites and others which are targeted by hackers.
An employer must be creative in dealing with these issues in order to protect its trade secret information. It may be as simple as requiring the employee to allow the company to install protections on the gadget. Or, to further limit access to information from a smartphone or tablet. Each company should research how their employees are using their personal gadgets for work and how to best protect the company's information. As with most trade secret/confidential information protection schemes, there really is no one size fits all solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment