Security concerns come in multiple forms for BYOD systems

The concept of bring your own device (BYOD) policies goes much further than just employees using their smartphones to check company email. BYOD trends can be seen in full effect on college campuses across the country. Thousands of students bringing their laptops, tablets and smartphones to connect to the same network for practical and impractical reasons alike.

A new article from CIO Magazine profiled the BYOD system at the University of Texas at Austin, the flagship of the UT system and looked at the challenges they face.

A 350-acre campus, with almost 200 buildings, are all linked by a 10 gigabit fiber optic backbone. When classes are in session, up to 120,000 individual devices – from serves, wireless hot spots, student devices and security camera – can be connected to the network.

As with any BYOD system, security becomes a major concern. A recent eWeek article looked at the importance of knowing who has access to a company's network. Any one device logged in can cause a problem but not all of them are a threat. Being able to differentiate between friend and foe goes a long way to preventing security threats.

"As with other universities, we have tens of thousands of users representing an even larger population of networked devices," said Cam Beasley, chief information security officer (CISO) of the University. "We have a constant need to identify anomalous user account behavior, detect, locate and quarantine compromised systems in real-time, and correlate events across multiple logging environments to more fully understand potential problems or threats."

BYOD systems bring with them a number of concerns that any organization needs to take into account. Businesses in Ohio that are interested in deploying a BYOD system would be wise to partner with an IT consulting firm.

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