Personal Devices at Work Cause Gigantic IT Headache
What’s an IT Department to do? Tell employees they can’t use personal mobile devices at work? Good luck with that because that ship has sailed. What you may not know is just how far out to sea it is.
In a Network World survey, 69% of IT managers say their employers let employees use personal mobile devices to connect to the corporate network, and 25% say they don’t have a policy about access or are unaware of one.
Industry analyst Aberdeen Group surveyed 500 enterprises and found that 72% permit use of employee-owned mobile devices for business purposes. Up from 40% two years ago. 45% said "yes" to any type of device, and 27% said devices had to be compliant with policy.
Another study asked IT directors if they feel pressured to support personal devices at work. 50% said yes. And 80% said they are asked regularly to implement enterprise apps and email on personal devices. Yet only 10% have set up policies.
The flood of personal devices at work is causing a gigantic security and compliance headache for IT, not to mention bandwidth issues resulting from social networking and file sharing. Back in mid-2010, a Cisco survey reported that more than 1/3 of respondents had a breach or loss of information due to unsupported network devices. Can’t help but wonder where the number is now.
How are you dealing with this changing environment?
Get some valuable IT insights from Marc Beattie of Wainhouse Research in an upcoming webinar sponsored by ACT Conferencing on August 25, 2011: Collaboration & Social Media: How to Tame User Anarchy. Details on this webinar coming soon!