The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend that’s swept across the business world provides benefits for employees as well as the organizations that they work for, however those benefits can come with a potential downside. BYOD opens businesses to data security; in fact personal mobile devices rank among the greatest security threats your small business will need to manage.

The good news is that there are steps you can take to help mitigate security breaches, however prior to building your mobile device management (MDM) strategy, you need to understand that security threats aren't limited to outside hackers. In a survey, business owners and IT ranked careless employees (66%) as a greater security risk than cybercriminals (34%) which is why it's imperative to not only come up with a good policy for managing mobile devices, but to also find a way of raising employee awareness.

Speaking with IT consulting company Iconic Mind, we've come up with several strategies that you can utilize to diminish the opportunity of your network being compromised from outside hackers as well as limit employee access to information on an as need basis.

Company Policy

A technological solution is only half of the equation - it's important that a policy is createdthat discusses in specific details what you expect employees to do and not to do with their mobile devices if you want to create a secure mobile environment.  Part of your policy should include real time communication between employees and the policy manager (typically IT) as well as education channels (see below) to distribute information to mobile users.

Part of your company policy should include how much access you give to an employee. While you want to encourage a positive work environment where employees feel trusted, you should  never give a staff member access to more data than necessary to get the job done. It's also imperative that you have a way of wiping all company data and network access from personal devices once a member of your company decides to leave or gets fired.

Educate Users

A security breach can exceed the cost of educating your staff on best practices, so take the time to educate your employees on the policies that you're putting forth. Make sure to attach emphasis as to the consequences of mobile device misuse, loss or theft so that you incentivize your employees to actually follow the corporate policy. 

Enforce Security Policies. 

Make sure you understand what aspects can and cannot be enforced when crafting your mobile policy.  Without any type of enforcement your company staff may very well look at the policies that you've just created as being optional.

Take a look at this helpful article on some of the top MDM software suites to help with enforcing your security policies if you don't have a full-time IT staff to help. As part of your overall mobile policy, you should also define reactive repercussions of noncompliance.

Leader Engagement

It's important that you get buy-in from company leaders, especially at smaller companies where IT staff may be limited. Understanding that mobile security is a strategic business issue, not just a technology problem, builds the right foundation for a more sound, comprehensive policy.

BYOD continues to be a growing trend making it important for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) to be proactive when it comes to implementing ways to prevent their networks and data from being compromised. 

With a well definied mobile policy, employees and enterprises can continue to enjoy the benefits of the BYOD craze while keeping the organization from hackers and other unwelcome chaos.

Andrey is a technology and business visionary with hands-on experience in automating enterprises. You can follow him on Twitter.