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Empower your employees with BYOD

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs and policies empower people to choose the best device to get their work done, including personally-owned consumer smartphones, tablets and laptops. BYOD should help people to become more mobile and productive while IT adapts to consumerization in a simple, secure and controlled manner. As consumerization continues to transform IT, organizations are moving quickly 
to design strategies to allow and embrace bring-your-own device (BYOD). A more satisfying work experience helps organizations recruit and retain the best employees. By shifting device ownership to employees and contractors, IT eases its burden for endpoint procurement and management.

Based on a technology foundation of enterprise mobility management, Windows app and desktop virtualization and secure file sharing, as well as proven best practices for BYOD, this strategy enables the organization to:

• Empower people to choose their own devices to improve productivity, collaboration and mobility
• Protect sensitive information from loss and theft while addressing privacy, compliance and risk management mandates
• Reduce costs and simplify management through self-service provisioning and automated management and monitoring
• Simplify IT with a single comprehensive solution to secure data, apps and devices

The reality is that many people are already bringing their own devices to work, regardless of whether the organization has a BYOD policy in place.

To date, BYOD has remained an informal practice for many organizations. In
 the meantime, the lack of a more coherent approach to BYOD can leave the organization exposed to risks from security and compliance gaps to escalating IT complexity. From a technology perspective, the most obvious question is how people will 
be able to access enterprise applications and business information on their personal devices. Simply installing apps directly on the device would raise serious security, privacy and compliance risks, license management issues and support complications, as well as restricting BYOD to Windows-based devices—and leaving other consumer devices out of the picture. Many people have also started using unmanaged third-party apps and online services for work—IT needs a way to control and manage this usage and prevent these apps from introducing security risks to the organization.

The ideal approach is to enable completely device-independent computing through enterprise mobility management, Windows app and desktop virtualization and secure file sharing, supplemented by online collaboration and remote support services. With this approach, IT can provide optimal freedom for people while maintaining security and control. People gain single-click secure access to all of their Windows, web, SaaS and mobile apps through a unified app store on any device, over any network, with single sign-on and seamless session roaming across locations, networks and devices. IT gains a single point of control to provision and de-provision apps of all types quickly, whether to provide new resources or to cut off access when it is no longer needed or appropriate. In most scenarios, business information remains secure in the datacenter; in cases where it has to reside on the endpoint, it is protected through isolation, encryption and remote wipe mechanisms.

BYOD policies can vary significantly from organization to organization depending on priorities and concerns, and should be designed in consultation with HR, finance, legal and IT security teams. Guidelines and best practices for policy development appear in the following section.

Elements of a complete BYOD strategy recommended by Citrix:

• A self-service app store providing unified, secure access and single sign-on to mobile, web, custom and Windows apps on any device, over any network
• Enterprise mobility management to secure both mobile devices and the business information they are used to access
• Secure on-demand delivery of apps and desktops to any device—personal or business—with tracking and monitoring to support compliance and privacy
• Secure file sharing and sync from any device
• Remote support for people and technologies in any location

Policies:

• Eligibility
• Allowed devices
• Service availability
• Rollout
• Cost sharing
• Security
• Support and maintenance

Considerations and best practices for BYOD

A successful BYOD initiative combines simplicity for people with effective security, control and management for IT. While the temptation can be strong for IT to develop specific policies for every conceivable scenario, the reality is that most considerations can be addressed through the application of a few simple, consistent principles. In most cases, IT can think about how to manage and provide people secure access to applications, data and files, complemented with role-based management, configuration and security of personally-owned devices to protect the organization against threats, data loss and non-compliant usage.

How does it work in Citrix

Citrix employees follow these BYOD guidelines:

1. Connect via Citrix Reciever
2. Access provisioned 
apps through a secure, 
unified app store
3. Share, sync and secure 
files via Citrix ShareFile
4. Use proper antivirus 
software
5. Contact vendor to 
address hardware issues
6. Follow all corporate 
policies including oversight of device security  

As a leader in flexible, mobile workstyles, as well as an early adopter of BYOD in our own organization, Citrix provides complete technologies backed with proven experience and best practices to deliver successful BYOD programs. Citrix BYOD solutions are already helping many organizations of all sizes realize the full benefits of BYOD and might help also to your organization.

Vladimir Špička, Sales Manager, EEC Central, Citrix Systems