At 1 pm today, Apple will formally unveil its Watch to the public. While other companies have launched smartwatches, because it’s Apple, today’s launch of the Apple Watch will officially herald the beginning of the era of wearables.
If the era of wearables is upon us, it means that as soon as your first employee wears a smartwatch to work, your HR, legal, and IT departments have a whole host of new issues with which to deal.
Better stated, the issues aren’t new, but their application to an evolving technology is.
If your organization already has a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, then you are well ahead of the game. You will, however, have to adapt that policy to account for WYOD (Wear Your Own Device). All you’ll have to do is extend your BYOD to expressly cover wearables. These devices will bring email, text messages, financial information, and health data to a smaller, even more portable form. And, the more avenues your employees have to access your network and data, the more ingresses hackers have to steal information and do other bad things. In other words, you need to understand wearables, and account for them in your policies, because your employees aren’t going to wait for an official green light to start using them.
If you don’t have a BYOD policy, what are you waiting for? These issues aren’t going away. What should you be considering? Here is a good starting point.