What is BYOA? -Definition, Types, Advantages and Disadvantages

Definition BYOA

Bring your own application provides employee wireless access to a company’s network for mobile and laptops working from any other location away from the office.

Bring your own applications  [(BYOA)] is the trend towards employees’ use of third-party apps and cloud services in the workplace.

[BYOA] is part of the broader trend of IT consumerization, which targets the use of consumer market technologies within the company.

Nowadays, a lot of employees work outside of a traditional office environment, from their smartphones, tablets, laptops, or employees. And also bring their own devices (BYOD) to work. Mobile devices that are owned by employees typically have consumer applications installed. And also, many employees access consumer and cloud applications and services over the corporate network.

Breach of data security

The benefits mentioned above of IT consumerization include greater employee participation and satisfaction, as well as improved productivity. However, as employee-owned technologies invade the corporate network, security becomes increasingly problematic. On the one hand, corporate data stored in the environment of a cloud provider cannot get protected. In the same way as locally stored data or even data stored on employee devices.

If a device with confidential information gets stolen, administrators can erase the hard disk remotely. Still, there is no such solution to protect the company in the event of a breach of data security in the environment provided by the cloud. Another problem associated with consumer technologies in the workplace is the demand for support resources to help a wide variety of non-standardized devices and applications.

Acceptable use policies (AUP)

To avoid such issues, organizations are implementing consumerization policies to establish standards for fair use of consumer technologies. Acceptable use policies (AUP) stipulate the requirements that should be followed to gain access to the network.

Advantaged and Disadvantages

[BYOA] is always about using private resources for business purposes. However, there are certain risks involved in this way of working. Companies can use their organizational guidelines to determine how individual devices can be used to access company data or internal networks. One of the advantages of BYOD is that there is great freedom of choice for employees, which takes personal needs into account. The model of your device in the workplace is associated with security risks because company-internal data gets used on third-party devices.