Are you ready for BYOD 2.0?

Are you ready for BYOD 2.0?

We've all become used to the acronym BYOD – or bring-your-own-device. However, with many organizations still struggling to allow employees to use personal devices in the workplace, they also now have to start thinking about the next challenge – BYOD 2.0!

This phenomenon sees applications designed for consumers finding their way into the corporate tool box. These services – such as Dropbox, Skype, Google Apps, WordPress, GoToMyPC – all were originally designed for the consumer market, but are being adopted by the workforce to simplify collaboration and improve flexibility.

The main issue is that these apps were not designed to be used in a corporate environment. As well as presenting potential scaling issues, their critical flaw is that security is often an afterthought rather than a primary consideration. For example, many of these apps, particularly the free versions, are protected purely by a password – and we all know how insecure that can be. Automated password-cracking software can perform 100 million checks per second – equating to a four-character password being cracked in 0.16 seconds, a six-character password in 11.4 minutes, and an eight-character password in just 32 days. 

If you think the potential damage is limited, think again. Many high-profile individuals have had their Twitter accounts hijacked, resulting in abusive tweets to followers. Dropbox too has been hacked, exposing all manner of secrets.

The long and short of it is: If you want some type of external connection application to work in an enterprise environment, then you are duty bound to add a decent level of security.