A way forward for the development of BYOD

My views on a possible solution to the use of BYOD in the workplace.

One of the problems facing the information security world is the use of BYOD devices within the work environment and how the work environment can be kept segregated from non-work activities, if the same device is used for both, especially so if the device ends up being used by more than one member of the family.

What is required is going back to the secure design life cycle and designing the relevant features in to the devices to support BYOD in the work place, one possible design solution to the problem is for the manufactures of popular devices such as smart phones, tables, laptops and such derivatives to design features to support virtual instances of the device for use in both the work and non-work environment.

A requirement for BYOD is to protect and segregate work and non-work activities and by having effectively having two or even higher multiples of the device within a single product this can be come a reality.

This concept is already common place in the workplace and the home environment with visualisation of servers and PC’s, there are phones which contain two phones inside, one normal and the other encrypted, wireless access points come with multiple SSID’s over multiple bands. In the UK the phone provider BT uses a second SSID on wireless access point to provide roaming connectivity to its customers independently of the home users WLAN connection.

With processors for smart phones and tablets are available with multiple cores, memory and storage capacities are becoming greater, and visualisation being a mature technology. It should be possible to have virtual instances of the laptop, tablet or smart phone on the device and be able to switch between instances. Security on the access can be done with biometrics with the current sensors built in to these devices, face recognition or voice recognition for example. This solution would also be useful if devices are to be shared between family members by taking the concept of profiles a stage further.