Intro to Big Data

Taken from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation:

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.

Research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office examines the state of digital data and documents the significant value that can potentially be unlocked.

MGI studied big data in five domains—healthcare in the United States, the public sector in Europe, retail in the United States, and manufacturing and personal-location data globally. Big data can generate value in each. For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. Harnessing big data in the public sector has enormous potential, too. If US healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US healthcare expenditure by about 8 percent. In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues. And users of services enabled by personal-location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus. The research offers seven key insights.

1. Data have swept into every industry and business function and are now an important factor of production, alongside labor and capital. We estimated that, by 2009, nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data (twice the size of US retailer Wal-Mart's data warehouse in 1999) per company with more than 1,000 employees.

2. There are five broad ways in which using big data can create value. First, big data can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much higher frequency. Second, as organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore expose variability and boost performance. Leading companies are using data collection and analysis to conduct controlled experiments to make better management decisions; others are using data for basic low-frequency forecasting to high-frequency nowcasting to adjust their business levers just in time. Third, big data allows ever-narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services. Fourth, sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making. Finally, big data can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services. For instance, manufacturers are using data obtained from sensors embedded in products to create innovative after-sales service offerings such as proactive maintenance (preventive measures that take place before a failure occurs or is even noticed).

3. The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information. Indeed, we found early examples of such use of data in every sector we examined.

4. The use of big data will underpin new waves of productivity growth and consumer surplus. For example, we estimate that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. Big data offers considerable benefits to consumers as well as to companies and organizations. For instance, services enabled by personal-location data can allow consumers to capture $600 billion in economic surplus.

5. While the use of big data will matter across sectors, some sectors are set for greater gains. We compared the historical productivity of sectors in the United States with the potential of these sectors to capture value from big data (using an index that combines several quantitative metrics), and found that the opportunities and challenges vary from sector to sector. The computer and electronic products and information sectors, as well as finance and insurance, and government are poised to gain substantially from the use of big data.

6. There will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.

7. Several issues will have to be addressed to capture the full potential of big data. Policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability will need to be addressed in a big data world. Organizations need not only to put the right talent and technology in place but also structure workflows and incentives to optimize the use of big data. Access to data is critical—companies will increasingly need to integrate information from multiple data sources, often from third parties, and the incentives have to be in place to enable this.

Big data is one of those emerging technologies that could potentially change the face of many industries, including healthcare. 

Moving Objects With Your Mind

Taken from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/75146.html:

Researchers have developed a robotic arm that has enabled a paralyzed woman to drink a cup of coffee -- by directly controlling it with her mind. The development has raised the question of whether this approach could perhaps restore some mobility to similarly affected people in the future.  The 58-year-old woman was one of two participants in the BrainGate 2 project who controlled a robotic arm with their thoughts.  Implants the size of baby aspirin tablets in the subjects' brains let them control the robotic arms. The project is led by Brown University and includes researchers from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the German Aerospace Center.  "Our device connects back from the brain to the outside world, which could be a computer, a robot on a table which could be a useful assistant, or to a prosthetic limb that would carry out limb-like functions driven by your brain," John Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience and engineering at Brown University and one of the study's senior authors, told TechNewsWorld.

How the System Works

An electrode array is placed in the brain's motor cortex, which governs the motion of the limbs. Specifically, it's placed in the hand/arm area of the motor cortex. It reads the pattern of activity among nearby brain cells and feeds those signals to a computer that then uses these signals to move the robotic arm.  "The spatial and temporal pattern of activity across many neurons in [the hand/arm] area normally determines the direction and amplitude of arm movement," Scott Currie, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Riverside, told TechNewsWorld. This pattern of activity, called a "neuronal population vector," is generated if a person even imagines the arm movement.  The subject, Cathy Hutchinson, used the robotic arm to grab a flask of coffee on a nearby table, lift it and hold it to her lips. She was paralyzed and left unable to speak by a stroke nearly 15 years ago.  Hutchinson used a robotic arm attached to computers that process the information sent from her brain. These computers are currently about the size of a minifridge but could be shrunk down over time to something "the size of a smartphone," Brown University's Donoghue  said. A prosthetic limb that will be usable in real life is about 10 to 15 years away, he suggested.

It's a Long, Hard Road

The signals sent by the implant in the woman's brain to the robotic arm may have enabled her to raise a flask to her mouth, but much more work will need to be done before the system is fit for common use, Lee Miller, the Edgar C. Stuntz distinguished professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University, told  TechNewsWorld.  "There's no question [BrainGate2] is an impressive development, but if you look at the quality of those movements, it's not really something that's functionally useful at this point," Miller remarked. "Clearly it's early stage."  Miller led a study at Northwestern in which monkeys were used as test subjects for brain electrode implants.

Fit the Solution to the Problem

BrainGate2 "is certainly a very promising direction for neuroprosthetics research, but it's one of many, so I wouldn't call it the future of prosthetics," UC Riverside's Currie said.  BrainGate2 is being used for people who had a stroke, Northwestern University's Miller said. It might not be suitable for amputees or people with cervical spine issues.  For example, Todd Kuiken and Gregory Dumanian of NorthWestern University have pioneered targeted reinnervation, Miller pointed out. Here, the nerves of a targeted muscle are cut or deactivated and replaced by the remaining nerves of an amputated limb to drive a prosthetic device.

Although the article states that this technology is over a decade away, the progress that has been made thus far is very impressive.  To think that in the near future, amputees and paraplegics will be able to gain their mobility.

Valid Medical Resources Online

Taken from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74457.html:

Online medical resources are improving healthcare, access to information and communication between patients and physicians.  Patients -- and even doctors -- who want more information about a health topic are more likely to turn to the Web than any other source, and that trend is only increasing.  This arena is one Karolyn Gazella understands firsthand. She collaborates with the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians to publish the Natural Medicine Journal, and though she started her career in traditional print media, she sees electronic information as a boon to people interested in learning more about health issues and topics.

"As an 'old school' print publisher, it was difficult at first to enter the world of online health publishing, but now I wonder most days how we lived without it," Gazella told TechNewsWorld. "Because we are an e-journal, we can reach a much broader audience."  A primary benefit of online publishing in the medical community is the ability to respond quickly to new information as it's released.  "Compared to a print journal, Natural Medicine Journal can respond quickly to important events," said Gazella. "For example, the natural health industry has ingredients sourced from Japan, so we did stories regarding the nuclear disaster in Japan shortly after it happened."  The downside of finding medical information online, however, is that it's not always true, and consumers might not understand the commercial or other interests behind the information.  "Surveys show that one of the key reasons many people use the Web is to gather health information," said Gazella. "This has become a double-edged sword because not all information on the Web is accurate or can be trusted. Armed with misinformation, patients can make life-changing decisions that could in fact cause harm to their health. On the other hand, when consumers find quality, trusted information, they become more empowered, informed and inclined to be proactive. When used properly, medical information found on the Web can be incredibly important to one's health."  Cancer sites, in particular, are sometimes suspect, according to Gazella, who also publishes a site called CancerThrivers, which offers information about cancer treatments and research.  "The worst offenders are sites that make claims for cancer cures that are not substantiated in the scientific literature or sites that encourage cancer patients to deny conventional treatment in place of an unproven treatment," said Gazella. "Cancer patients and their families are some of the most frequent visitors to health information websites, so we need to take care not to be irresponsible in our discussions surrounding alternative cancer treatments."

Health Hubs

Remedy Health Media is another company that provides a variety of sites and services for health-related information.  One of its sites, HealthCentral, provides expert patient and physician information from around 2,000 people living with over 30 diseases and conditions, including everything from heart problems and rheumatoid arthritis to cancer.  "A lot of people in the industry talk about 'living-with information,' and HealthCentral has the most expert living-with information, because of the patient experts who write it," Jim Curtis, Remedy Health Media's chief revenue officer, told TechNewsWorld. "It's the most real living-with content because it's coming from someone who's living with it."  Remedy also provides health content in partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine on its HealthCommunities site, and it publishes one of the oldest HIV-related sites on the Web, called The Body, which was founded in 1995.  "[People] can get information about being safe, patient testimonials, symptoms and treatments, and breaking news," said Curtis. "It's a site that allows people to connect with a community about being diagnosed and find ways to live with the disease."

Making the Grade

Patients can also get information about physicians and hospitals online, facilitated by companies such as HealthGrades, which publishes profiles of 750,000 physicians in the U.S. as well as information about and ratings of most major hospitals.  "HealthGrades is the number one provider of quality healthcare information," Kristin Reed, vice president of hospital ratings for HealthGrades, told TechNewsWorld. "Our goal is to give consumers information that they need to make important quality decisions."  Information about physicians comes from public and private databases, patient reviews and physicians themselves. Hospital information comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. HealthGrades reviews risk-adjusted mortality rates and then assigns ratings to hospitals based on that data.  "Our mission is to guide America to its best health," said Reed. "What we're trying to do is empower consumers with the information they need. We really try to provide as comprehensive information as possible."  For people searching for information online, Reed suggests that they do thorough research using trusted sources.  "Research everything," said Reed. "Know everything you can about your condition. Don't make your decision based on reputation alone. Reputation is not an objective source of information."  Perhaps the most useful function of online medical resources is that they encourage and facilitate conversations between patients and their doctors.  "With digital medical information, it's much easier for people to get information," said Curtis. "They can be more informed and have better doctor discussions. People will read information on a website and then come up with questions to ask their doctor."

I happen to be one of those people who constantly turn to the web for medical knowledge.  Now I'm not a physician looking for medical information, but if i could diagnose myself for something simple as opposed to making a visit to the doctor's office, I'm all for it.  Usually I turn to WebMD but sometimes I want to see what other sites think, so I'll do a Google search.  Ultimately, I end up getting frustrated because the information can sometimes be inconsistent, usually based on personal opinion rather than actual facts.  This issue obviously affects physician than your average person.  This article addresses the issue and points out where physicians can find accurate medical information.

Avaya to Bring in New Medical Apps

Taken from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74472.html:

Avaya has provided a sneak preview of several healthcare IT-based mobile applications it will be rolling out later this year at the 2012 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition now under way in Las Vegas. These include Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, Avaya Flare Communicator for iPad, and other collaborative service offerings in telehealth and social media.  Healthcare is one of Avaya's chief verticals, said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya's Healthcare Solutions group.  "When you look at where the industry is going, you see that mobile collaboration and telehealth -- two areas of focus for us -- has become a critical area for firms. There are (US)$300 million to $400 million worth of opportunities in this space," he told CRM Buyer.  The common themes running through Avaya's next set of product releases include care coordination, patient interaction and telehealth/home-care delivery, said Gupta.  The Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, for example, is a "closed-loop" HIPAA-compliant mobile application that prioritizes and consolidates nurse call alerts, critical result notifications, stat requests, and coworker messages.  It will be first available on the iOS mobile platform.  "What we did was create a single client that combines all of the communications forms that a nurse needs, from text messaging to phone calls to alarms and notifications," Gupta said. "The entire history of this communication is maintained on the system's back end."  Mobile Activity Assistant also lets users see if their coworkers are available -- it features "presence" in other words -- and gives them the ability to contact via voice or text. It also comes with  preconfigured text messages to speed responses.

Enabling the iPad in the Hospital

Another new product release will be Avaya Flare Communicator for iPad for the healthcare industry. It is a tablet application to be used over secure WiFi and 3G networks.  It too comes with presence functionality, so the user can see if a specialist or clinician or a patient's particular doctor is available. Users can initiate instant messages, emails, calls and conferences as well. Flare Communicator for iPad also lets users share other important data such as X-rays and lab results.  Such applications are in high demand by hospital CIOs right now, Gupta said. "Enabling mobile devices with secure applications is a big challenge."  For example, the CIO of a large healthcare organization including a teaching hospital is in the process of equipping its doctors, residents and clinical staff with 3,000 iPads, he noted, so they can access patient records and better communicate on the go.  Social Media Outreach Avaya is also introducing Avaya Social Media Manager later this year. Part marketing, part social media and part contact center and scheduling app, the product inserts a doctor's office into a social media conversation to offer relevant information -- and hopefully, a chance for the prospect to make an appointment.  Such conversations must be initiated carefully, Gupta acknowledged. He doesn't envision doctors or hospitals making unsolicited offers via the social media application. Rather, it will be used as part of an ongoing conversation.  "Suppose someone asks for a recommendation for a particular doctor's specialty or asks about which hospital is best for a procedure. Using Social Media Manager, the office can offer information -- say an article in U.S. News and World Report listing the top 10 hospitals where that type of surgery has the greatest success rate. Then, if the person is interested, the application can offer an appointment."  Such a product will be better received by a younger generation of patient, Nucleus Research Vice President Rebecca Wettemann told CRM Buyer.  "However, concerns about privacy and the security of social networks will make a lot of people think twice about sharing information over a social network," she added. For this reason, "we have not yet seen a lot of adoption of social media in the field of medicine."  By contrast, tablets have significant potential in this space, noted Wettemann. "We think we will see, as tablets become more broadly adopted, such applications grow -- especially as healthcare IT providers show the real benefits they provide to patients."  There are a number of security measures in both the social media and the tablet applications, Gupta said. With tablets, for example, the application can erase all patient data remotely if a tablet is lost or stolen.

Expanding Telehealth Opportunities

Avaya also debuted its Telehealth and Home-Care Delivery application at HIMSS.  A video communication tool, it gives home care nurses and rural hospital workers access to specialists around the world.  Users can initiate a video conference by selecting a link from an email. A nurse could conduct certain diagnostic tests -- for example, taking a throat culture. Then, the doctor at the other end of the video transmission would receive high-quality images of the test's results. "Instead of driving two hours to an appointment -- for someone in a rural area -- or worse, having to wait several months for an appointment to see a specialist, a nurse at a local facility can help facilitate a video conference with an off-location doctor," Gupta said.

Avaya is hitting the nail right on the head with it's latest array of healthcare driven mobile apps.  Focusing on ways for medical professionals to communicate fast and effectively is very important.  I think that utilizing Wi-Fi is very important since cell phone reception in hospitals can be spotty and, in some areas, not even allowed.  At my organization, we are always trying to find ways to utilize Wi-Fi as much as possible to provide a more reliable means of receiving email, texts, and video calling.  Taking advantage of Wi-Fi also cuts down costs on corporate phones since 3G is not being used as much.

More on BYOD and Encryption

Taken from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/75245.html:

The growth of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, in which employees use their personal devices in the workplace, is proving to be a huge headache for IT.  Often underfunded, understaffed and overworked, IT now has to cope with a plethora of different devices running different operating systems -- or different versions of an operating system. These devices often contain sensitive enterprise material and are basically not secured.  That has led to a flood of vendors offering mobile device management (MDM) and mobile security products. These will let corporations enforce policies, remotely wipe devices and control access to sensitive corporate information on devices.  But what if a device is lost and the owner doesn't even realize it for hours? How can you locate a device or wipe it if you don't even know it's lost? And what if the  employee doesn't report the loss because the device is a personal rather than a corporate one?  "The mere fact that the owner of the device is not the organization itself or an entity that has met compliance requirements may give chief privacy officers and legal staff serious cause for concern," Stephen Cobb, a security evangelist at ESET, told TechNewsWorld. Further, "77 percent of employees never reported their devices lost, and 160,000 portable devices are left in taxis in Chicago every year."  "The primary enterprise app that BYOD employees want on their smartphone is corporate email," Dan Shey, a practice director at ABI Research, told TechNewsWorld. One of the "biggest concerns" with that is that more corporate communications, and possibly data, are leaving the workplace. "At a minimum, smartphones need password protection, but activating encryption on the device is even better."  Providing security on mobile devices "was cited as one of the top priorities for IT security professionals for 2012" in McAfee's State of Security report published in March, Ratinder Ahuja, chief technology officer and vice president of mobile, network, cloud and content at McAfee, told TechNewsWorld. The company surveyed nearly 500 companies with 1,000 or more employees worldwide.

When to Encrypt

Mobile devices should be encrypted "wherever highly sensitive data are found on the device," Tom Wills, managing director of Singapore-based consultants Secure Strategies, told TechNewsWorld.  Such data includes the power-on and screensaver password, the SIM card, passwords to open apps or certain functions within apps such as logging into an e-commerce retailer account, confidential email, instant messages, SMS messages, and confidential data and medical files.  "The more sensitive and valuable the data, the greater the need for stronger encryption," Wills said.  Many enterprises take a risk management approach to security, but this shouldn't be used when deciding whether or not to encrypt data, Wills warned.

Types of Encryption

Enterprises can opt to encrypt applications or for hardware encryption.  For example, Enlocked offers an app that secures email in transit through a simple plug-in. It works with popular email systems and runs on PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones. Users can secure individual messages. The company has announced plans to offer an enterprise-level version.  However, software encryption is CPU-intensive and tends to slow applications down, Secure Strategies' Wills pointed out.  Hardware encryption is another option. "The nice thing about hardware-based encryption is the performance," Randy Abrams, an independent security consultant, told TechNewsWorld. However, "there is no universal hardware-based encryption protocol for the myriad of devices out there."  On the other hand, application-level encryption is portable "and allows for flexibility in providing different levels of encryption for different needs," Abrams pointed out.

Taking Encryption Further

Essentially, only the newer mobile devices in the market offer hardware-level encryption, Xuxian Jiang, chief scientist at NQ Mobile, told TechNewsWorld. Both iPhones and iPads running iOS 4.0 or later offer hardware-level encryption but earlier versions of the OS do not. Android devices running Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich also support hardware-level encryption.  As currently implemented, however, weaknesses in both Android and iOS "make application-level encryption preferable when IT is developing corporate apps," ESET's Cobb said.  "NQ Mobile is currently exploring the effectiveness of different encryption approaches for mobile devices," Jiang said. Meanwhile, "the major mobile software platforms are shifting towards making encryption available, and the underlying device hardware is becoming powerful enough to warrant widespread encryption."  Organizations "are going to have to encrypt sensitive data transmitted to and from mobile devices, and data stored on those devices," ESET's Cobb remarked. "Courts may well find, if not now then before too long, that failure to encrypt falls short of a reasonable standard of due care."

Tailor Encryption to Your Needs

Before implementing encryption on all mobile devices in the enterprise, it's best to think through what's needed and where.  The encryption schema should match the mission of the organization and the role of the mobile device within that structure, ESET security researcher Cameron Camp told TechNewsWorld. For example, the salesforce may need encryption of traffic and files, while employees with mobile access to critical intellectual property "would need more advanced protections like fewer failed passwords before the device auto-wipes the data, remote wipe by IT over the air, and GPS-based tracking."  Organizations should start by defining their needs, or they will "end up trying to find solutions for the wrong problem," consultant Abrams said. Once an organization understands its topology, it can implement appropriate access control. Then assessing security needs for the rest of the data "leaves more tightly defined requirements that solutions can be properly aligned to."

Encryption plays an integral part in making sure sensitive information does not end up in the wrong hands.  This was something that always existed, however, with the introduction of BYOD, there is now this sense of urgency to make sure information is kept within an organization.  The key challenge that was brought up in this article is making sure data does not leave the organization along with the device.  It is easy to lock down a computer, a laptop, or even a corporate cell phone that belongs to the company, but that's a viable option when a personal device comes into play. 

New technologies such as ForeScout CounterACT analyze the network and allows to get detailed information about who is on your network.  This is a hardware-based appliance which means nothing gets installed on a user's personal device.  We are currently using a demo of this at the hospital and, contrary to what the article said, everything is viewable from PCs, laptops, iPhones, Androids, and even printers.

There are still kinks to work out concerning the whole BYOD subject.  While there are pros and cons to both hardware and software encryption, they are still the best options in making sure sensitive material does not get out into the open.  There are many other things we can do in our organization to help against theft of data including limiting access via a portal and preventing downloads from company shared drives.

BYOD: Bring Your Own Device

Taken from http://blogs.computerworld.com/20227/implementing_a_byod_policy_on_your_network:

BYOD seems to be one of the hottest topics in IT security right now. Every day I read about new concerns which can arise when employees access networks with their own devices. From what I experience the adoption of BYOD is on the increase.

We need to look at ways of securing mobile devices and educating users on best practices for using them. It can be very challenging implementing policies which ban the devices completely; someone somewhere will have a very compelling need for using mobile devices when they are out of the office.  A properly secured mobile device can become a very useful business tool.

New technologies have also come online which promise to do everything from detecting to blocking mobile devices on your network. There are two main things to focus on for BYOD. Firstly you need to be aware of what devices are connecting to your network and secondly you need to understand what they are been used for. A number of vendors have developed products that claim to be able to detect mobile devices on your network. If you are considering getting something in this space, I would recommend that you check if the solution can also report on what data is been copied to these devices.

You then need to understand why mobile devices are used in the first place. For most people it means the ability to access their work email when they are away from the office. For others it means the ability to access ERP and customer management systems. It is important to check if the mobile applications store any local data.

One of the biggest problems with BYOD is what happens when the devices leave your network. A device that is loaded with company data and emails is very dangerous if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Most mobile devices come with basic security features like password and gesture locks. However most people do not enable these and when they do they use very weak passwords and typing in long passwords on a small screen is time consuming. The inbuilt security features of mobile devices should also be treated with caution as bugs and flaws can be found with them. An example of this was a bug with the way a smart cover could be used to unlock an iPad 2 when running certain versions of the Apple iOS.

You also have the problem of what becomes of the data on mobile devices when an employee leaves their job. In the past you handed back your laptop and your logon account was disabled when you moved on to another job. I don't think it will be well received when you ask an employee to hand over their smart devices so that they can be erased.

If you are going to allow BYOD on your network, the task of educating employees on best practices for securing their devices should be a top priority. Complex passwords to unlock devices should be mandatory and try to spot check if users are adhering to this policy. If you have to give users access to business applications, try and use web portals as much as possible. Web portals avoid the need to store local copies of data on mobile devices. You should try and ensure that once a user disconnects from your network no company data remains on their device. A mobile device should be a window for looking in on your work, not a local copy of your work. 

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is definitely a hot topic and a big security concern.  Users want to link up their personal devices to their companies network so that they can gain access to company resources such as shared folders and email.  This has definitely become more of a necessity with the use of smartphones.  A good way to control devices and what they get access to is to present them with a login screen where they can either login as a guest where get limited or internet only access, or login with their user credentials give them their standard level of access they normally would get at their desk. Now although I agree that it is definitely a concern if users are saving sensitive data to their devices, but I'm not sure how it's any different than using your company's VPN.  For years, we have allowed users to login in from home using the VPN but there was never mention of security concerns.  All in all, BYOD software is a good way to monitor and control who gets what type of access.