When it comes to productivity trends, bring-your-own-device/computer is a leading strategy for many companies. Professionals using an OS and machine they are familiar with can enhance workflow and ensure they are optimizing their own performance. This, of course, presents some unique challenges for businesses, such as ensuring the applications needed for operations are supported on a number of platforms, but in a data center is raises key security compliance questions that also have to be addressed.

Should an enterprise want to launch a BYOD/C strategy within its data center, security should be a top concern. With employees brining their own machines, be they tablets, laptops or even USB drives, into the data center, the risk of data being uploaded and stolen increases incrementally. Internal theft is a growing risk that businesses are examining, and while BYOD/C solutions offer significant improvements to productivity, they also enable this security threat.

“It’s really hard to ensure that information on employee-owned hardware and software is secure. For security professionals, BYOD/C seems like a nightmare,” SYS-CON Media contributor Paul Diamond noted. “Personal devices are getting smarter and are better able to store and do more with corporate data, especially with the proliferation of personal cloud storage like Evernote, Amazon S3 and even Facebook. They also become a bigger target for hackers.”

In order to foster productivity and efficiency improvements without increased risk, businesses need to ensure they are optimizing their building access control strategies. Biometric technology applied directly to the server rack offers optimized protection that doesn’t limit the potential for BYOD/C strategies in a general sense.

By installing biometric security solutions, enterprises can limit access to their servers and other key facilities and optimize protection through fingerprint-based authorization. In turn, this prevents employees with no business access a server rack from accessing sensitive data and uploading it to a personal device – without barring those devices from the workplace in general.

With security as such a top concern, leveraging these solutions for optimized protection is important. As such, investing in high-quality biometric solutions and pairing them with the right software and access control system will set the strongest foundation for server protection possible. The right strategy will optimize security practices and help businesses evolve their data center operations without increased risk or privacy concerns growing out of those improvements.