Is BYOD Putting Your Company at Risk?

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This blog is the first in a series of posts focused on Simply Connected.

The recent trend toward IT “consumerization” has flooded corporate IT with a host of new apps and personal devices, forcing businesses to re-think their network access strategies.  While these apps and devices raise valid concerns about security, compliance and management complexity, do they actually put your business at risk? 

Some IT organizations don’t want to take any chances and simply deny network access to any device that isn’t under their complete control.  However, a recent survey by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that 86% of respondents considered mobile devices as critical to or very important for their business processes and productivity.

So what should CxOs and IT managers do about this growing “bring your own device” trend?  Allowing employees to use their personal devices at work is the most cost-effective option.  After all, it makes sense to utilize employees’ willingness to bring and use the devices of their choice.  However, with traditional solutions, this requires creating multiple policies that are difficult to coordinate consistently across the network resulting in gaps in security enforcement, and may be disruptive for users trying to connect to corporate resources.

The solution is a “unified policy”—a holistic approach to coordinated security for enterprise network access, regardless of who owns a given device.

Juniper’s unified policy approach achieves three critical things:

• Create policy only once, across wired, wireless and remote access including extensive device coverage for both BYOD and IT-managed devices
• Add intelligence with a context aware policy that is tailored to the security risk, accounting for the user, device, application, and location
• Coordinated enforcement across the wired, wireless, and remote access delivering consistent and secure network access

Juniper Networks’ Simply Connected unified policy approach allows organizations to translate a business policy based on the user’s role and identity, into a single unified policy for network access. This policy leverages Juniper’s integrated application awareness for secure and managed use of Web 2.0 applications. Productivity is enhanced and security is maintained.

Read more about Juniper Networks Simply Connected Portfolio, and stay tuned for the next Simply Connected blog entry that will address mobile device/BYOD user experience and policy automation and consistency.

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Novarum, an independent consulting firm specializing in wireless broadband technology, recently conducted performance testing on the Juniper Networks WLA532 Wireless LAN Access Point. The test found that the WLA532 is the highest-performing 802.11n three-spatial-stream enterprise access point at 5 GHz. The results also show that the superior 5 GHz throughput of the WLA532 at extended range makes it practical to deploy 5 GHz wireless in the enterprise.