Deploying a BYOD Policy could be a good choice for your company to keep a reasonable size of your fleet of devices.

BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device and allows / encourages people to use their own devices for work (ie laptops, smartphones). It might sound like a silver bullet for many problems but it is not that easy to deploy: Security breach possibilities, weak maintenance of the fleet (thus more chance for security breaches), ...

Here are some tips for a successful BYOD policy:

- Strategy and preparation

• Tag along your IT security / legal teams to cover all angles and prevent potential security breaches
• Prepare masters for your IT team to be able to deploy it on employees' device. That should make you save time and money!
• A BYOD policy can be paired well with a telecom expense management system, explore this too!
• Think of an exit strategy. If an employee leaves the company, prepare the exit process to prevent any potential breach. This is one of the most important measures l.

- Legal and communication

• Have a clear statement on which devices you accept (devices, models, OS, brands, ...) and which teams can use personal devices (some teams might have more critical information than others). Keep it simple, do not try to cover all existing devices in the world.
• Make your policy clear for employees to know where they stand. Train your IT team to make sure they can provide support for employees' devices.
• From a legal point of view, specify responsibilities for data and network usages. Enforce boundaries to prevent users from abusive behaviours.
• Provide internal communication material to encourage people to follow BYOD

- Infrastructures, data and security

• Deploy a resilient and secure IT infrastructures, especially servers and online platforms (Sharepoint, Slack, ...). VPN are included and much welcome.
• Use SSO authentication processes to have your employees save time to access apps.
• Deploy basic security through Identity access management and authentication process. The authentication process shall be secure enough and convenient. Otherwise, prepare to receive may complaints from your employees!
• Be quite careful with emails
• Set up a data protection policy
• Enforce the rules by a thorough monitoring
• Split personal and professional data
• Use in-house apps to align with your policy
• Decide software updates policies yourself

- Maintenance and reimbursement

• Encourage employees with favorable enticing reimbursement plans. But set up rules to prevent abusive behaviours.
• Be extremely cautious with the maintenance process. Set the rules and either: take care of it yourself OR make your employees responsible for it (you can pay half of it for instance).

If you believe BYOD is not made for your company, you can enforce COPE (Coporate Owned Personally Enabled). This is like BYOD but the difference is that the company provides the device, so extra attention should be brought to maintenance processes.