Cloud-Based Security Solutions to See Growth as BYOD Security Risks Increase in a Hybrid Workplace

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

Based on Bring Your Own Device or BYOD statistics, 85% of organizations implemented BYOD policies because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People speculated whether BYOD will continue once the pandemic is over and workers go back to the office.

Looking at the findings of new studies, it seems that there’s no going back to traditional office-based work. That means BYOD practices will also remain—if not thrive as more companies adopt a hybrid workplace.

Employees, for their part, prefer remote work. For example, younger workers aged 18-24 say they would be willing to take at the most an 18% pay cut to work remotely. Also, of job seekers, more than 60% now prefer remote roles. Meanwhile, 11% of employed job seekers want to leave their current jobs to work remotely in the future.

Furthermore, the benefits of work-from-home arrangements allow workers to achieve what was previously thought of as the elusive work-life balance. According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, American workers now spend less time on work and more time sleeping and doing leisure activities with household members. As a result, experts believe that workers will bargain even harder to maintain the ability to work from home.

With employers wanting to keep top talent and with some already struggling to fill vacant positions, more companies will likely integrate remote work into their operations. They’ll be more open to adopting a hybrid workplace to satisfy employee preferences and attract highly skilled talents.

As the forecasts from Microsoft’s Future of Work Report 2022 stated, work will not snap back to pre-pandemic practices. What experts believe will happen is that “people and organizations will carry forward their learnings from the past two years and develop new hybrid work practices that are fundamentally different.”

BYOD Security Risks

With remote work and hybrid workplaces as the new normal, we can expect BYOD to also become standard practice for companies. But while BYOD offers benefits and may even be necessary for growth, businesses shouldn’t sacrifice security over benefits.

BYOD can refer to employees using their own devices or the company providing the devices to employees. Whichever approach a company allows, this won’t change the fact that BYOD security risks are present in both. That’s because employees might inadvertently connect to insecure networks.

Moreover, BYOD devices essentially share multiple software and access company data and cloud services. Both corporate data and employee’s personal data are at risk of exposure. Also, since there could literally be hundreds or thousands of BYOD devices being used in an organization, shadow IT becomes a serious security threat and it can be hard for IT and security teams to monitor each device manually. This is where cloud-based security solutions can help.

Cloud-Based Security for BYOD

More and more organizations are using cloud-based security solutions to address BYOD security risks. In fact, the rising trend of BYOD use is one of the driving forces behind the global cloud security solutions market growth. Analysts estimate the market to grow at a double-digit CAGR of 15.16% and reach $8.63 billion during the period 2021 to 2026.

Cloud security providers are receiving more requests for tailor-made security solutions for devices such as smartphones and tablets. One of the most in-demand is conditional access. This allows IT managers or admins to create specific conditions to protect company data. The user, the BYOD device, and the network must meet these conditions before they can access and process critical data.

For example, admins can require devices to have a passcode. They can also require users to enable remote lock and wipe on their devices or require operating systems to be up to date.

Conditional access policies are also the building blocks of a Zero Trust device management strategy. Zero Trust is considered the most effective way to secure individual devices in a work-from-anywhere environment. It does away with traditional perimeter-level authentication (applying security only on enterprise-owned network boundaries). Instead, it applies resource-level authentication (each device must be verified or denied).

Cloud-based security solutions can also include capabilities to wipe out data from a device. This becomes especially relevant in instances where a device is stolen. If the user’s level of access is high enough to require a severe response, cloud security solutions can address this problem by executing commands with scripts or simple point-and-click security commands.