We hear a lot about BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – today as more and more people are equipped with more and more devices. You don’t have to watch the mobile device sales to know that the mobile takeover is both prevalent and pervasive. That became increasingly clear to me last week during my travels to South Korea to visit the Samsung research and development facilities there.

Whether you’re a school, a church, professional services business or a hotel, guests bring their devices into your facilities and it is the expectation that they can gain wireless access. So, the question arises: How are you managing the mobile takeover of your network?

BYOD Meets MDM
Mobile Device Management, often referred to as a MDM, is becoming increasingly important to organizations of all sizes across virtually every industry. BYOD relates to people bringing their mobile devices into your facilities and tapping into your network. Mobile Device Management focuses on how those devices can access your network and what they have access to.

In the past, organizations commonly established two networks: a guest wireless and another, usually secured network for business. Under that scenario, people have access to your entire network – data and all – just like they plugged in directly. That poses a serious security threat.

Varying Levels
There are varying levels of Mobile Device Management that organizations can employ. For some, they simply want the ability to remotely wipe devices to protect their data. The threat and need to protect information is leading more organizations to consider comprehensive and higher-end solutions such as Cisco’s ISE.

Solutions like ISE allow organizations to establish a series of networking access controls and automates mobile device connectivity based on preset criteria.

So, why is Mobile Device Management important? Here are a few reasons:

• Remote Control Over Data: The ability to remotely wipe a mobile device that has accessed your network is important in protecting your organization’s data. You never know what has been stored on an individual’s device, even unknowingly, and what can happen if it gets in the wrong hands.
   
• Resource Management: The number of users accessing your network affects your bandwidth. A high number of personal devices of your employees or business devices of your guests on your network will limit and potentially compromise your ability to do business. With MDM, organizations can limit network utilization based on a set of rights or privileges by user group.
   
• Security: The increase in mobile devices and constant connectivity puts your network at a significant risk of virus attacks and information breaches without proper protection. In many cases, the employee contracts a virus at home or at another location and then brings it to work and infects the network – without even knowing it. Mobile Device Management allows organizations to automatically check for viruses before a device has access to a network and limit access based on who the person is.
   
• Metrics Reporting: I’ve talked about Big Data in the past and MDM also has applications that allows organizations to pull and analyze a series of data, just because individuals walked into their facility with a mobile device. Retailers can determine traffic patterns and if people spend more time in one aisle or another. Schools can evaluate where students congregate at certain times during the day. The scenarios are almost endless and allow organizations to use the BYOD movement to their advantage in marketing, programming and planning.

Next Steps
The first step to managing the BYOD in your organizations is evaluating your infrastructure. The number of office locations, wireless access points and potential peak users you have determine what you will need on the back end to ensure you have what you need for your operations.

The next step is to determine how much your organization would like to regulate access. Most organizations opt to segment their network to protect what they need to operate while providing wireless access for guests.

The prevalence of mobile devices is expected to only climb. Taking steps today will ensure your organization has what it needs to operate effectively and efficiently manage in this new reality.