Why IT Must Embrace BYOD

A new report summarizing a June survey of 335 IT professionals conducted by MokaFive makes one thing clear: “bring your own device” (BYOD) is here to stay. According to 88 percent of respondents, their companies had some sort of BYOD -- sanctioned or not.

IT departments that don’t pay attention to this trend are sure to suffer; the survey points out that BYOD brings “rampant use of insecure cloud services like Dropbox.” If you need proof, consider this: 73.6 percent admit to personally using (or knowing that their company uses) such a service. “These commercial cloud storage and backup providers can present security risks to corporate data, since data in is the hands of a third party,” the survey summary points out.

More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) of respondents say their company allows employees to use personal computing hardware (including laptops and mobile devices such as smartphones) at work. Nearly two-thirds (65.6 percent) of respondents can (or have permission to) access corporate resources such as file shares from a personal device. Of these, 63 percent use a VPN, 17.8 percent use full-disk encryption, 28.3 percent use two-factor authentication, and 26.4 percent use mobile device management software.

Survey respondents are under no illusions about security issues; 77 percent said “current security approaches, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM) [is] too intrusive.” MokaFive characterizes respondents’ animosity this way: “BYOD approaches provide security at the expense of privacy.” Of course, many organizations have no BYOD policy -- as many as 10 percent in this survey.

The two-page summary is available at no cost at here.

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 07/23/2012