How to make BYOD work for your company – Qwil Messenger

Who can use this feature?

System administrators only

What is BYOD?

BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device. Increasingly companies are not providing company phones and computers to employees but instead allowing and promoting the use of personal devices for work instead.

The benefits of BYOD

With smartphone technology getting more and more advanced there are many benefits of BYOD. These include:

Reduced company costs with no hardware costs and maintenance
Increased productivity as all staff have a smart phone
Improved efficiency as everything is on the same device

However, allowing your staff to use the smart devices they already own also requires strict security controls. This can be done either built-in by design in the professional application used as is the case for Qwil Messenger or enterprise software MDM (Mobile Device Management e.g. Mobileiron) with configuration settings installed on each mobile device to manage devices and applications (such as mail, calendar or contacts).

What are the risks?

Protecting your data is critical which is why you will already be using remote access on desktops restricting the documents that can be taken out of the company network. The biggest challenge with BYOD is remaining in full control of your company data and keeping everything separate from the employee’s personal information (as it is their device), while staying secure.

When dealing with clients, data protection becomes a greater issue, in the advent of GDPR and data privacy laws. It is your responsibility to look after your client data, and so you must restrict the data transferred onto a mobile device. Many devices are backed up on the phone manufacturers cloud services, which may be outside of Europe.

For regulated firms, this problem is doubled as from a regulatory standpoint, calls and texts from privately owned phones are not recorded for compliance.

"A firm must take all reasonable steps to prevent an employee or contractor from making, sending, or receiving relevant telephone conversations and electronic communications on privately-owned equipment which the firm is unable to record or copy."

- article 16(7) of MiFID, eighth subparagraph

The solution is a combination of policy and technology.

Qwil's BYOD solution.

Qwil Messenger provides enterprise-grade security with BYOD restrictions out of the box. These settings can be adjusted by your company System Admin according to your policy. Please refer to roles and permissions to understand who can do what under settings.

Every aspect of our platform has been designed to meet the most stringent security requirements of the world's largest regulated firms. Our measures include:

Two-step verification for every user, on every device.
End-to-end data encryption both in-flight and at rest.
Users only have access to the features and functions they are entitled to and we fully audit every system action, including read receipt for each message sent.
Data containerisation on staff mobile devices (BYOD friendly out of the box) and network access restrictions to only allow staff access from authorised workstations using CIDR blocks.

Qwil Messenger empowers you to let your employees use BYOD devices without the need for MDM (Mobile Device Management) software, giving you and your staff peace of mind. Qwil is a common platform for all, and users may be staff member of one organisation and a client of another which is why we have designed settings per company but without the need for one to centrally control the application.

Qwil BYOD settings

The settings below apply to all staff users within your organisation and prevent data (whether text, documents, pictures etc) to be imported and exported on a mobile device. Staff users can use these functions on the desktop app or browser instead. These controls are turned on by default for Enterprise customers and can be changed according to your policies. Note that clients are not restricted as it is their data and their device.

Here is what System Administrators at your organisation can adjust:

Allow staff to copy/paste
If this option is disabled, staff users will not be able to copy or paste chat messages on their devices. This prevents sharing messages outside of the app in the same way as importing / exporting documents.
Allow staff to import documents
If this option is disabled, staff users will not be able to send files or documents from their device. They will only be able to send pictures taken from their camera while inside the Qwil application and these will not be saved onto their devices.
Allow staff to export documents
If this option is disabled, staff users will not be able to save images or documents that were sent to them through Qwil to their devices. This setting ensures only Qwil's built in browser is used to open links. Professional and personal data, communication and browsing are kept separate at all times.
Allow staff to call or email contacts
If this option is disabled, staff users will not be able to tap on a contact's details to call them or to send an email. Please note, even if this option is disabled, contact information will still be visible although not clickable. This is to ensure that all communications between staff and clients are recorded for compliance purposes.
Allow staff users to use the mobile app offline
If you enable offline access the mobile app can run while offline. If this option is disabled, the mobile app will be able to run for a limited time. Once this period expires, users must come online in order to continue accessing data on Qwil. This restriction only applies to staff users.

By default, all permissions are disabled and need to be changed by a System Admin.

System admin can find out more about adjusting features here.

Separating personal and professional contacts under BYOD to prevent GDPR breaches

Qwil never accesses your users' personal phone books. A user's contact list on Qwil Messenger is set up and managed by the company. Each user’s list can be tailored to create dedicated contact points between clients, partners and representatives that align with the organisation’s coverage and servicing models.

The use of MDM can in most cases differentiate between Apps that are managed or not managed by the software and can therefore prevent an upload of business contacts to other apps on the personal phone, such as WhatsApp for example without the consent which may result in a GDPR breach.