Survey Says BYOD Is Here To Stay And That May Not Be Good: Ovum

One of the big trends in business is BYOD or bring your own device. According to a recent survey by research group Ovum shows that this trend isn’t going away. Nearly 70% of employees who own a smartphone or tablet choose to use it to access corporate data. The personal tablet market continues to grow, and with personal tablet ownership by FTEs rising from 28.4% to 44.5% over the last 12 months, more businesses will see these devices on their networks. Moreover, this activity will continue whether the CIO wants it to or not. Ovum’s study shows that 67.8% of smartphone-owning employees bring their own smartphone to work, and 15.4% of these do so without the IT department’s knowledge and 20.9% do so in spite of an anti-BYOD policy.

That’s the problem. All these personal devices have access to personal data. 25.6% of employees discovered their own enterprise social networking apps, while 22.1% and 30.7% of employees discovered their own file sync and share apps and IM/VoIP apps, respectively. All done without the knowledge or assistance of a corporate IT group. That puts companies at risk as they wouldn’t know where their data could go seeing as they don’t know or control the devices that the data is used on.

So if you’re a company, you might want to get a handle on your BYOD strategy. Because if you don’t do that. your employees will define it for you without you knowing about it.

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