Bring Your Own Environment

BYOD has been around for a long time. Employees wanted to bring diverse devices into their organization and while IT departments were hesitant, it is now a widely accepted practice.

Once Covid-19 hit and new trend emerged – Bring Your Own Environment or BYOE. Employees were working from a number of diverse locations and now once again IT departments are being challenged to create policies to ensure privacy and security. Here are our top tips for effective BYOE policies.

BYOE Policies

As businesses work to craft BYOE policies, a central question that needs to be answered is whether human augmentation can be secure and private while also being effectively used to improve daily interactions.

• Security. This type of technology inherently raises security risks. Unlike traditional risks that travel with devices, with human augmentation technology, the risks travel with the employee.
• Privacy. Human augmentation technology makes data and intimate knowledge easily accessible. As such, it raises privacy concerns that businesses need to be aware of and address.
• Compliance. This is a new type of technology that is rapidly changing. Consequently, regulatory and government agencies are frequently issuing new regulatory and compliance requirements. Businesses should keep these requirements in mind when crafting policies and be aware of the need to consistently monitor those changes and adjust policies accordingly.
• Health Impacts. Enhancements have the potential to lead to long-term mental and physical problems. Unfortunately, however, the health impacts are still not fully understood. Nevertheless, this is an issue that businesses need to consider when contemplating utilizing human augmentation in their workplace.
• Ethics. Clearly, human augmentation raises a variety of ethical concerns including identifying specific vulnerabilities, risks, and broad moral issues. Additionally, there are increasingly concerns about the “digital divide,” as much of this technology is only accessible to wealthier employees.

Further, when crafting policies, it’s important to include incentives for employees to follow and comply with the policies to ensure that they’re utilized and effective.

As enhancements become increasingly mainstream in the workplace, it’s important for organizations to find ways to safely take advantage of the benefits they provide. Doing so can lead to improved employee morale as well as increased productivity and safety. That said, enhancements raise some unique concerns and businesses need to carefully balance privacy, autonomy, data security, and transparency when expanding BYOD policies to include BYOE.