Employers, here’s something you need to consider about BYOD
As you can imagine, data recovery companies receive multiple drives – and
therefore a truly enormous amount of data – on a daily basis. A significant
portion of this data could be described as personal and/or sensitive. This is
precisely why any company that deals in the act of recovering data from failed
hard drives, phones, PCs etc. must adhere to the data protection act (soon to
be replaced by the GDPR) and ensure that all information gleaned from any
device remains confidential.
In recent years, a trend has developed amongst employees which has seen them
bring, and use, their own devices at work (dubbed BYOD or Bring Your Own
Device). These devices tend to contain personal and sensitive data concerning
the individual as well as data that is vital to their employer. This can, under
certain circumstances, be problematic for all concerned.
Imagine for a moment if an employee has been using their own laptop at work.
The laptop’s drive contains data that belong to the device’s owner and that
this individual would not want their employer to see. The hard drive also
contains information that is vital to the employer, has failed, and they have
therefore insisted that it be recovered by hard drive recovery specialists. As the company instructed to retrieve
this data will be unable to open any of the files it may recover, it will be
unable to determine which of the files are relevant to the business and which
are not. This means that they will be unable to determine whose data is whose.
In this situation everyone loses: the employee is unhappy that his employers
could have potentially received personal and private data, the company is
unhappy as the trust that exists between them and their employee will have
diminished and the company that recovered that data is unhappy because their
customers are unhappy. Yes, you could argue that all data could simply be
returned to the employee and that they could then pass their employer’s data
back to them, but if the data is truly vital, then it is fair to say that they
will want it back as quickly as possible. What if there was a way to avoid
this?
With more and more employees using their own devices at work, it is
necessary for employers and employees to discuss effective and robust means of
managing the data that will be stored on these devices. It may be advisable to,
for example, partition the drive so that all company data can be stored in one
part of the drive only. Alternatively, the employee could simply keep a
spreadsheet containing the names of all files that belong to the company and
that they’ve stored on their personal devices. In the event of the drive
failing, data could then be recovered from the drive and the relevant data
returned to the parties that require it only. Finally, employers could consider
attaching a drive to their networks which employees must use to store any files
they create whilst using their own devices at work.
The growth of BYOD does have the potential to cause problems for companies
and employees alike, but anticipation, effective planning and the creation of
appropriate polices can prevent this.
If you’ve lost vital data, you can book a free data recovery diagnostic and get a no-obligation data recovery quote here.