The Anti-virus Times

Thursday, October 27, 2016

In practice, the BYOD principle is not only leading to a situation where employees are beginning to work longer than a legal eight-hour [in Russia] workday, but also to the accumulation of corporate information on their computers and devices—things like internal correspondence in local mail databases, contracts edited on a computer, and internal regulations and instructions that were downloaded for evening-time study. Temporary files and folders are part of that, too—how many managers know where they are and how they need to be cleaned (and more important, why!)?

But, that’s not all. When a company’s services are insufficient, inconvenient, and either hard to access or temporarily unavailable, situations can arise where employees begin using external services—sometimes without permission, sometimes with the tacit approval of management, and sometimes because this practice is simply acceptable within a company. Unfortunately, statistics show that most employees are using external services instead of corporate ones.

This happens for a variety of reasons, but in most cases, it’s because the company’s service is slow, inaccessible, or prone to lose information—whether employers like it or not, employees will use alternative external services.

By the way, after leaving one workplace, employees continue using external services at their new workplace…but using their old accounts.

As a result, external storage devices carry an accumulation of documents from several different places of work. A familiar situation, isn’t it? Well, who would create a new account on Gmail or Dropbox just because they switched jobs?

https://www.intermedia.net/assets/pdf/do_ex-employees_still_have_access_to_your_corporate_data.pdf

89% of employees have access (true, this does not mean that all of them use it) to at least one system from their previous job. However, slightly more than a half of all the data they can access is non-confidential.

And there’s more!

60% of companies do not change their passwords after employee dismissals and do not demand that departing employees surrender their passwords for external systems.

Of course, most people are honest, but imagine this situation: at a new job, a conscientious employee falls ill and gives another employee their password to Dropbox, where documents from their previous workplace can be found!

23% - a percentage that does not offer companies much peace of mind.

And what about you? Do you keep your company’s information on external services that only you can access? And do you have written permission from your managers to do so? #BYOD