The broad appeal of using personal mobile devices at work has driven IT to develop effective employee device policies. While allowing employees to “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) does have its advantages, traditional costs associated with users connecting to the network actually increase because the number of devices has increased. There are a number of ways you can effectively reduce the cost employee owned devices by turning to some well-established best practices for password management.
The majority of BYOD expenses come in the form of help desk calls when a user changes his or her Active Directory (AD) password. Often an application, like email, on the user’s mobile device will have a hard coded password that is sent when the device connects Active Directory automatically. When the AD password is no longer in sync with the device, chances are good that an AD account lockout will be triggered when the device repeatedly attempts authentication with the incorrect password.
Three solutions that will allow you to mitigate the costs of BYOD are 1) Self-Service Password Reset & Account Unlock, 2) User Notification that a password is about to expire 3) Account Lockout diagnostics. These three solutions are purpose built to reduce operational costs by empowering end-users to resolve issues themselves and where that isn’t possible reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue as quickly as possible.
The three solutions mentioned here also have additional benefits beyond mobile device users. These solutions also reduce overall cost of ownership for PC or MAC clients by empowering those users also to reset their own passwords when they forget them. With Netwrix products you reduce the expense of both desktop and mobile clients while simultaneously reducing the time it will take to resolve issues for these users.
For more information on the solutions mentioned here visit our Identity Management Suite page by clicking here.