Four Best Practices for Securing Your Network with the Rise of BYOD

At Novatech, we help businesses with their Managed IT Services, and one of the areas that has become a challenge, especially since 2020, is the rise of BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices).

We have come up with some ways that we believe will help your network and will protect your business in the long run. We take security very seriously, so BYOD is a major area of emphasis we focus on. We focus on BYOD because often these devices miss the robust security tools our provided devices have loaded into them.

In this article, we are going to cover four best practices for keeping your network safe while your employees are bringing their own devices to work and joining your network with their phones, tablets, or computers. We will even add a couple of bonus ideas because this is one area that most companies need to have a better process to handle.

Here are the four best ways to keep your network safe now that BYOD is becoming more popular:

• Set up a strong policy for passwords: Demand that all employees make passwords that are hard to guess and that they change their passwords often. To store passwords safely, you should encourage people to use password managers.
• Use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution: Use an MDM solution to manage and protect work-related mobile devices. Features like remote wipe, encryption, and app control can be a part of this.
• Use Network Access Control (NAC) to make sure that only approved devices can connect to the network. Before letting a device connect to your network, NAC can check to see if it meets security standards. This helps keep your network safe.
• Teach employees the best ways to maintain security: teach your employees how important security is and what risks come with BYOD. Give training on how to use the internet safely, how to avoid phishing scams, and how to make sure devices have the latest security patches.

If that is not enough, here are a couple of bonus ideas which will help your network security even more:

• MFA stands for “multi-factor authentication.” MFA can be used to make the login process even more secure. This can help keep people from getting into your network without permission. This can be something as simple as after you login to a device, you authenticate your login through your cell phone to help make certain it was you logging in with the computer.
• Set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN): Use a VPN to encrypt network traffic between devices on the outside of your network and devices on your network. This can help stop snooping and other types of attacks on a network.

Novatech recognizes the importance of BYOD devices for most businesses, and the important thing to remember is that these devices will not pose more of a threat if they are treated with the same level of attention as corporately provided resources. Call Novatech to help institute policies that will protect your network and make BYOD safe and convenient for your staff.