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BYOD Headache Solved: Add a Business Phone Line to Personal Devices with BlackBerry WorkLife

Security’s far from the only challenge represented by BYOD. You’re allowing your employees to bring their own devices into the workplace, after all – and if you just leave it at that, they’ll use their personal phone number to conduct work over voice, text and data. That’s a problem.

How do you distinguish work use from personal use? How do you know if a phone call or text was made to a business associate or a family member? How do you accurately distinguish whether an employee was using their work email or playing a game? How do you own and retain a phone number even if an employee leaves?

How do you ensure a great work/life balance for your workers, while protecting both corporate data and user privacy?

The Headache of Regulated BYOD

In regulated industries, things get even more challenging, as many are required to keep records of all voice and text conversations related to the organization. Therein lies the problem. There’s no way of distinguishing whether communications on a personally-owned device is private or professional.

And you can’t record everything – not without violating employee privacy (and probably breaking the law).

It isn’t like you can do away with BYOD, either. Your employees are going to bring their personal devices into the workplace regardless of whether those devices are sanctioned. Even if you manage to convince staff to accept a COPE (Corporate-Owned, Personally-Enabled) deployment model, you’ll still be unable to easily differentiate between corporate and personal use.

Without that, privacy is still a concern – people will still use their devices for personal business. And while you could rely on dual-SIM devices to make this distinction, that’s both inconvenient for your users and expensive for you. After all, with COPE, you’re also bearing the cost of purchasing each device, too.

There’s another option.

Part of BlackBerry Secure, BlackBerry WorkLife allows you to add a separate corporate line on personal devices without having to worry about compliance or user privacy. With WorkLife, you can also draw a firm line between corporate and personal use, while also ensuring that each employee receives full and accurate compensation for corporate usage. With prior court rulings for BYOD reimbursement companies need to clearly understand costs.

This is achieved through two distinctive offerings: BlackBerry WorkLife Persona and BlackBerry WorkLife Data. Both solutions are cloud-based and carrier- and EMM-agnostic, ensuring that they can be deployed for any organization.

Take Control Of Corporate Identities

BlackBerry WorkLife Persona gives employees a separate corporate identity on their device without requiring an additional SIM. This eliminates the need for employees to use their personal numbers for work – meaning their personal lines stay private. And your organization can keep and reassign corporate phone numbers when employees leave, significantly reducing the impact to your customers. Your IT department, meanwhile, has full control over WorkLife Persona’s corporate profile, making cost management and regulatory compliance a breeze.

WorkLife Persona integrates readily with voice recording and text archiving platforms—such as Vantage, Global Relay, and GWAVA– recording only communications involving an employee’s corporate number.  It requires no additional mobile device installations, and is both cloud-based and carrier independent. This allows your business to easily meet regulatory compliance demands established by frameworks and directives such as MiFID II without requiring additional legwork from staff.

And with WorkLife’s advanced analytics features, you can easily monitor employees’ work-related voice and text usage, such as top users and length of calls, without visibility into their personal lives.  Voice calls, meanwhile, use connectivity from whatever carrier network an employee is on, making them inherently secure and reliable.

Streamline and Simplify Your Expense Management

BlackBerry WorkLife Data, meanwhile, is a powerful split billing solution. It allows you to automate reimbursements and maintain complete control over your employees’ data usage for business applications. From a simple console, administrators can selectively apply rules and policies for work applications without impacting personal apps. With built-in advanced analytics, it also lets you see how, where, when, and how much data your employees use across your entire corporate portfolio, integrating with existing expense management systems for easy reimbursements.

Together, WorkLife Persona and WorkLife Data offer better user privacy, a great user experience, and total visibility into where and how work devices are being used. By creating a separate corporate identity and walling off corporate voice, text and data from personal apps, BlackBerry increases productivity by eliminating employee concerns about being billed for work charges on their personal plans. Employees can work on mobile with confidence, and you can eliminate one of the final roadblocks to BYOD.

Remove the Last Roadblocks of BYOD with BlackBerry

BYOD does not have to be a financial, legal, and regulatory nightmare. With BlackBerry WorkLife, you can seamlessly draw a line between corporate and personal use. Your enterprise can create a separate corporate identity on any device, allowing it to meet stringent compliance requirements, reduce mobility costs, gain full control over corporate voice, text, and data usage, and make its BYOD program truly come alive.

And together with the rest of our product portfolio, you’ll have everything you need to secure, connect, and protect your employees– no matter where they are, and no matter how they choose to work.


Learn about the new
BlackBerry WorkLife here.

About Diana Levan