MDM: How to handle BYOD anxiety in your workplace

Educating our users about what MDM platforms can and cannot do is the first place to start when addressing employee apprehension & anxiety. The benefits don’t always outweigh the privacy costs for users who just simply don’t want to mix personal & business. Making your users feel like their privacy matters, and you collect little to no data they think you might.

Benefits of enrolling in Bring Your Own Device programs include:

Greater flexibility & mobility to the users. This is a nod to that ideal "digital nomad" lifestyle balance energy.
Increase overall efficiency & productivity
Raised employee satisfaction not having to carry 2 devices.
Allows for users to have device choice and not assigned a random device they do not want to use.
Cost savings on device purchases is an obvious win, especially when those users already have devices.

Heres some examples of what admins cannot see:

💡

Why is BYOD it secure? Let your users know in advance the likes of Apple, Google, and even Microsoft protect your mobile devices at the operating system level.

📸 Photos & Videos
🧑🏽‍💻 Browser data
💬 Text messages
📧 Personal Emails
🛡️ App Usage
🎙️Voicemails
📇Contacts
💻 Anything in your Google or AppleID accounts is protected

Heres an YT Shorts I made to help users overcome their anxiety.

What can admins see?

💡

Some FAQ's organizations face when introducing BYOD into their environment look like this. Why does my company really need to use this software? What is the purpose of this BYOD program?

📍 Location (users can opt-out at any time on most OS's)
💽 DeviceOS (I.e. 17.3)
- Administrators are looking for vulnerable operating systems, and who needs to update to not be susceptible to cyber attacks.
📱 Device Type (Pixel, Samsung, iPhone)
📞 Phone number
📋 Serial Number
🏷️ Device Name
🛠️ Uptime / Runtime
🔐 Work Container status
🔑 Encryption Status

What can admins do?

💡

This is whats possible, but it is not always needed. Your IT administrators need to be able to do some of the following options at any given time. Typically this is required by compliance regulators.

🔒 Lock a device
🔓 Unlock a device
📝 Push notifications
🗄️ Debug logs
📲 Initiate Remote Assist (typically always with user approval)
🔧 Restart a device if needed for troubleshooting
📈 Compliance reporting (Azure & GoogleBC)
🪧 Wipe
- However, administrators are able to protect personal devices from being wiped with a few easy clicks! Read the terms of use for your companies policies here.
📈 Policy Enforcement:
🔧 Push & Pull enterprise configurations to support work from home use cases.
- Configurations help IT help you. this modern devices management approach give users secure access to company resources to work from home, they need to push down configurations that allow you to be productive with Outlook, Teams, Zoom, and so on.

Want to learn more about beginning your BYOD journey or how to enroll a BYOD device? Heres a short video of a BYOD device being enrolled into Ivanti MDM.