Rise to the BYOD Challenge

Just one point of clarification.   ALL mail sent from or received by the company's server is NOT private to the end user.  Employers basically can look at all that traffic anytime for any reason.  Those mails are private and confidential to the employer not the employee.

As to avoiding the BYOD thing.  That ship has sailed.

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There could be several reasons for this. One of them could be employees wanting to access restricted sites like Facebook or YouTube. There are two things here: (1) If the employee uses his own device (like an iPhone) and connects to the Internet using the company's network (2) Employee uses his own device and connects via the carrier's network (ATT/Verizon 4G). In both cases, security issues exists. In case (1), the employer's network admins could impose restrictions on the network usage. For example, "Block all traffic emanating from iPhone" (easy to fetch via HTTP User-Agent field) but the user might simply 'fool' the Firewall by using other apps (Ex: Download Lite for iPhone) where in you can set the app to 'identify itself' as Firefox. The firewall ACL will fail here (since the firewall will most probably not block traffic coming out of Firefox) and the employee now is using the company network to access sites which are not supposed to be visited. The problem is how much do you trust iPhone's security levels. Most employees sync up their personal devices to the company mailers (like MS Exchange server) and will have all/some of the company mails stored on their phones (or at least the headers). We will all agree that most of those mails are private and confidential. If the device is compromised, there is a very good chance that a malicious cracker could actually access those private mails even when the employee is connected to the company's network. In case (2) the same issues exist. Since the mails/headers are stored locally on the device, having a compromised device will put those P & C data at risk even if you are using your carrier's network. Now how can company's network admins verify the security 'strength' of employees' personal devices? Theoretically, it could be done but might result in a lot of costs. And if the employee brings his iPhone/iPad/iPod or any such devices, the costs only go up. Avg # devcies/employee might come up to 2. You cannot then, simply BLOCK ALL traffic from personal devices since many employees might not be happy.

As so many devices are brought to the enterprise, they will be engaged constantly in “anytime, anywhere” communications with social networks, applications and services. This means the amount of communication and signaling that will traverse networks on which those enterprises rely will actually outpace the data traffic so many enterprisesfocus on. You are right in that all stakeholders should work collaboratively (MNOs, mobile tech vendors, enterprises, etc) so the quality of user experience is enhanced, not encumbered, by the networks empowering enterprise environments (as with cloud and M2M). http://blog.tekelec.com/