=Bring your own device is an increasing trend towards employee-owned devices within business. BYOD is where organizations allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes. The proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and laptops have given rise to BYOD. Bring your own device model has significant impact in the healthcare system (Garba, et al. 2015). For instance, physicians and other health professionals are getting health information through emails and opening them on their phones. Besides, health information can be automatically uploaded to a cloud platform where it can easily be accessed by the healthcare providers using their own devices. However, with the increasing trend of BYOD becoming integral part in daily operations in healthcare organizations, there is a need to comprehend BYOD security and overall healthcare mobile security.
Security issues associated with BYOD
One of the major security issue associated with BYOD is that the personal devices can be lost or stolen. If the device has patient health information stored in it, then a healthcare organization can be at risk of data breach. The three most vulnerable forms of stolen or lost patient information are employee records, patient billing information, and non-patient records. Data breaches can leads to unauthorized access to healthcare information which often exposes sensitive information from personally identifiable information such as patient’s medical histories, health insurance information, addresses sensitive to health data, names, and social security numbers (Garba, et al. 2015). There BYOD brings increased responsibility for clinicians when they use their own devices. Due to vulnerability of patient information which may be stored in personal devices, there needs to be physical safeguards in these devices which is a key component to maintaining security measures. According to U.S Department of Human Health Services, health organizations should implement procedures, policies, and physical measures to protect health information from unauthorized intrusion and natural and environmental hazards (Wang, Wei, & Vangury, 2014).
Another security issues associated with BYOD is mixing personal and professional use of mobile devices. With the increasing trend of BYOD, there are concerns from health professionals about the loss of privacy for personal communication. BYOD may compromise professional behavior especially when personal information is accidentally conveyed to the wrong person. BYOD in healthcare environment requires a shift in culture that revolves around transparency. Without transparency in BYOD, neither the users nor the policy makers will achieve the intended purpose of this initiative (Wang, Wei, & Vangury, 2014).
According to Garba, et al. (2015) unsecure networks is also another security issue associated with BYOD. The convenience that allows employees to use their devices in work environment gives other people to intercept their data. When healthcare professional use their devices which contains health information for their organization in an unsecure Wi-Fi, they put their organization’s data at risk. Prospective studies indicate that mobile devices are at risk of getting exposed to an attack when connected to unsecure Wi-Fi especially when not connected to the company’s VPN.
Addressing security issues associated with BYOD
The administration should ensure that the employees are aware of the security concerns related to BYOD. Awareness among the employees may be created through educating them on the potential harm associated with BYOD to avoid any of these security issues at all costs. Besides, unified threat management and an application-layer firewall can help secure a BYOD initiative within an organization once these devices are appropriately synced with the existing security systems. These security measures should be made mandatory for all employees taking part in BYOD to prevent security issues relating to possible data breaches that may occurs in the organization’s network (Bello et al. 2015).
References
Bello Garba, A., Armarego, J., & Murray, D. (2015). Bring your own device organizational information security and privacy. ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 10(3), 1279-1287.
Garba, A. B., Armarego, J., Murray, D., & Kenworthy, W. (2015). Review of the information security and privacy challenges in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environments. Journal of Information privacy and security, 11(1), 38-54.
Wang, Y., Wei, J., & Vangury, K. (2014, January). Bring your own device security issues and challenges. In Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2014 IEEE 11th (pp. 80-85). IEEE.
