BYOD

BYOD seems to be the latest buzz word in security.  In case you aren't completely caught up with the news, BYOD stands for "Bring Your Own Device".  It refers to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets that employees are bringing into work and attaching on to the organization's network.  It's estimated the average employee owns 2.4 devices that they bring into work and connect to the network.

This brings its own challenges, including how to enforce corporate policy on those devices.  While policy may be enforced by the secure web gateway or proxy when the device is on the organization's network, what about policy when it's off the network and on some public network?  That's important to make sure the device doesn't get infected or suffers data loss due to a malware attack.  Plus there's the issue that the device uses applications that sometimes use different URLs, protocols, and ports than the web version of that application.  It's possible your secure web gateway may not understand the mobile app, while it's happily blocking or controlling the web application.

The other challenge these devices bring is around performance and bandwidth.  While the secure web gateway may have enough performance and bandwidth for one device per employee, what happens when there's three and all three are checking and updating webmail and Facebook at the same time?  These devices also have a bandwidth challenge when they download updates to their operating system.  iOS updates have been rather large lately, and if every iOS device downloads their updates during work hours, is your secure web gateway prepared? BYOD only promises to increase as the tablet and smartphone market continues to grow.

It's time to make sure your secure web gateway has up to date technology to handle mobile, as well as enough capacity to handle the coming increase in bandwidth requirements.  This may be a good time to look at bandwidth saving technologies as well, including caching and stream splitting for video, one of the biggest hogs of network bandwidth.