Letting your team use their own phones for work just makes life easier. It saves you the cost of extra company hardware, and nobody has to carry two phones around. But an important thing to remember is that the same convenience means your business data is now sitting on a device you don’t fully control next to personal social media, banking and gaming apps. So before you settle into this arrangement, it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s really at risk and how to keep it safe.

Why Do Companies Allow People to Use Their Own Mobile Devices Despite Data Protection Risks?

Allowing employees to use their personal devices, like phones, for work is known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Employers often permit it for a few key reasons:

Personal Phones Are Convenient

With BYOD, employees only need to carry one device instead of two, and they can handle personal and work communications without switching between phones, saving valuable time.

Cost Efficiencies

When staff use their own phones, businesses avoid the costs of new hardware, repairs, and ongoing maintenance.

Faster Onboarding

Workers already know how their own phones work, so there’s no learning curve like there might be with a company-issued device running unfamiliar software. New hires can also start contributing right away, rather than waiting on procurement to approve and issue a work phone.

What Data Is at Risk?

The trouble with letting staff use their own devices is that you have little control over how secure those devices really are. If cybercriminals manage to hack into one, the following types of data could be exposed:

Company Credentials

A compromised phone can hand attackers the keys to your systems, including sensitive credentials such as:

• Single-sign-on (SSO) tokens
• Credentials stored in built-in password managers

Company and Employee Information

Cybercriminals could also steal clients’ and employees’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as names, dates of birth, and email addresses.

They can use this information to impersonate victims or sell it on the dark web for profit. Exposing PII is also a breach of GDPR rules and could lead to hefty fines.

Business Communication

Attackers can also access sensitive business communications, including work emails, chat histories, calendar schedules, and more.

Intellectual Property

If an employee’s phone falls into the wrong hands, sensitive business information such as product designs, financial data, and trade secrets could be exposed too.

Key Security Risks

Personal phones don’t come with the enterprise-grade security your company systems rely on, which leaves them exposed to a range of risks, including:

Public WiFi Threats

Do your team members connect to public WiFi when they’re out of the office? These networks are open to anyone, which makes them far less secure than a home or office connection.

And they carry several risks, including:

Man-in-the-middle Attacks

This happens when a hacker uses public WiFi to intercept communication between your network or website and your employee’s phone.

Evil Twin Hotspots

Ever tried to connect to a familiar network and noticed several options with almost identical names? That could be the work of a hacker, hoping to trick unsuspecting users into joining a fake connection so they can compromise the device.

Snooping

Cybercriminals can also use specialised software to quietly eavesdrop on everything a device does.

Disgruntled Former Staff

Not every employee leaves on good terms.

Someone with bad intentions could create a hidden admin account or sync company files to their personal device before they go. If HR and IT don’t move quickly to cut off access to sensitive systems, a former employee could cause serious damage from the outside, such as planting malware, stealing data, or sabotaging the business.

Device Theft

People lose phones all the time, and criminals sometimes steal them deliberately, hoping to exploit ‘permission sprawl’, accounts and apps the device is still logged into that give them a direct route into your systems.

Malware and Viruses

Employees could unknowingly visit websites that infect their phones with malware or viruses, turning the device into a gateway straight into your corporate network. From there, cybercriminals can install further malware, intercept Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) codes, and steal intellectual property, among other things.

Legal and Compliance Considerations

The UK GDPR doesn’t ban BYOD outright, but it does expect businesses to go the extra mile to keep client and employee data safe on personal devices.

Getting this wrong can be costly: wrongful exposure of this data could result in severe ICO penalties and fines running into the millions.

That’s why business owners need to put the right technical and organisational controls in place to keep unauthorised parties out.

How Businesses Can Reduce Data Loss Risk to Boost Data Protection

The good news is there’s plenty you can do to reduce these BYOD risks. Here are a few key measures:

Introducing BYOD Policies

A clear BYOD policy spells out exactly what your organisation expects from employees when they use personal phones to access company systems. It should also list which devices are permitted and which apps employees can and can’t use to access company data.

Register BYOD Devices

Registering approved phones is essential. It creates an audit trail if anything goes wrong, and it makes offboarding far simpler: once a worker leaves, you can simply block their device from the network.

Deploy Mobile App Management (MAM)

Also known as Mobile Device Management (MDM), this software lets you monitor how a device interacts with company data. Employees will need to consent to it before it’s installed.

Encrypt Company Data

Encrypting sensitive data keeps it unreadable while it’s in transit, so even if someone intercepts it, they won’t be able to make sense of it.

To keep your clients data safe and compliant with GDPR all personal phones and devices need to have proper data protection.

Not sure where to start with a BYOD policy, data encryption, or any of the other measures above?

Book a FREE consultation with Simon for a full run-through of your options.