Remember the days when company data could be largely protected by just monitoring the devices and employees in the office? Those were the good old days.

Today, we have to worry about mobile and BYOD security. According to Cisco, in 2015, there were 7.9 billion global mobile devices and connections. This number continues to grow and the increasing vulnerability of these devices makes employee mobile safety more important than ever for the protection of your company’s data.

Our top 2 mobile security tips

To help protect your company data from the influx of internet connected devices entering and leaving your office, here are our top 2 mobile security and BYOD tips:

1. Public WiFi

While it would be amazing if you could prevent employees from using public WiFi, it might not be realistic; employees are going to connect their phones and laptops to public WiFi. However, we don’t need make it easy for hackers to gain access to these devices. Most hackers trolling coffee shop and airport WiFi are looking for easy targets, so set up your employees’ devices to make hacking them a chore.

Here are a few tips for protecting a device from being hacked on public WiFi:

• Use a VPN
• Enable the “Always Use HTTPS” option on browsers
• Turn off sharing

2. Don’t allow access on the device

We have all heard the saying, “it is a matter of when not if you get hacked.” Fortunately, if a device has no data on it company data can’t be stolen. One of the best BYOD tips is to give access, not limit it. That means don’t give everyone and every device all-access passes and cut some access when prompted; only give each employee and device the limited access they need from the start. For some, that may mean no access at all.

These two mobile security tips take a realistic approach to getting started by protecting your company data today. Both BYOD tips require a small budget and no new software. What are some of your easy-to-implement, first-time BYOD security tips?