Today’s workplace is becoming increasingly agreeable to the BYOD
(bring your own device) concept: Employers are finally giving the green
light for staffers to use their own equipment for work while they're at
the office. For businesses, it's cheaper to let employees bring in their
own laptops, smartphones, or tablets, since that cuts down on the need
to purchase hardware (though not on the need to support it). Regardless,
businesses seem to have little choice in the matter, since many
employees are bringing their devices in whether they have permission or
not--and some people are knowingly breaking the company’s security policy in doing so.
If you want to bring your own Android or iOS tablet to work, you
should consider a couple of factors before taking the plunge. First, in
some respects you lose ownership of your device once you commit to using
it at work and keeping potentially sensitive data on it. Corporate
intellectual property or client data is extremely valuable to your
employer, and as such you lose certain freedoms regarding any device
that contains that information. Mishandle that information, and you
might lose your job.
Second, you have to think about how to secure the device against
tampering, to protect its information and thereby minimize your loss of
ownership. If you plan to store confidential material of any kind on
your tablet, you’ll want to safeguard that data against the chance that
you lose the device or let it slip into the wrong hands.
So how do you keep your data secure? You encrypt it. The field of
data encryption is always changing, and you can encrypt your tablet in
many different ways. Here are a few popular methods of tablet encryption
that I was able to test.
Encryption Basics
For our purposes, encryption is a process that changes data in a way
that makes it unreadable to anyone who doesn’t possess the key to unlock
it. The data is, in theory, useless without the key, thus affording
some measure of security in the case of theft or loss.
Encryption itself is a complicated topic. For a PC, you can purchase
encryption software or encrypted hardware, as well as products that
encrypt the “whole” disc, including the Master Boot Record. The debate
over which approach is better rages on.