Bring Your Own Device: Easy to Do, Hard to Manage
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 Kevin Murray, VP, Product Marketing
Nearly a year ago we predicted that companies will adopt a “bring your own mobile device” policy. Yet you didn’t need a crystal ball to see that the popularity of iPhones and Androids would drive this change in the workplace, expanding the mobile workforce and dethroning the BlackBerry.
Today we released our annual survey of IT executives, the Mobile Enterprise Report, which reveals exactly what devices enterprises are now supporting, how policies have changed and what the overall impact has been on IT.
The cascade of new devices, provisioned, supported or allowed is creating challenges for IT. IT executives report that their top five mobility issues are:
- Providing support for specialized members’ (e.g. an executive) non-provisioned devices
- Onboarding and ongoing support for personal mobile devices
- Data encryption, data loss, data back-up, and recovery
- Ensuring network security (e.g., anti-virus, firewall, VPN, etc.)
- Onboarding and ongoing support for corporate mobile devices (10 percent
It is no wonder that providing support for a “specialized member” [Read: executive and his/her new gadget] was number one, considering that 61 percent of IT departments have made an exception for a specialized member and 57 percent have done this more than once.
The report also reveals that 73 percent of enterprises allow non-IT managed devices to access corporate resources – what we also call a Bring-Your-Own-Device – BYOD – policy. Not only are non-IT managed devices growing, enterprises are also expanding support for iPhones and Androids – 67 percent of enterprises plan to increase their provisioning of iPhones (up from 52 percent who currently do), 64 percent will provision Android smartphones (up from 48 percent).
And new on the scene, tablets are also quickly gaining momentum – either as a replacement for a laptop or as an additional mobile device. Within the next 12 months, 66 percent of enterprises will provision iPads (up from 46 percent), and 44 percent will provision Android tablets (up from just 19 percent today).
IT executives report that technical support volumes and complexity have increased – 48 percent of IT departments stated that employees contacted IT more with technical support issues than they did two years ago. 45 percent of IT departments stated that the IT problems were more complex than two years ago.
Security problems are also on the rise, especially with non-IT managed devices – 46 percent of IT executives admitted to experiencing a security problem related to an employee with an unprovisioned device.
And connectivity remains expensive, and will only rise – 68 percent of IT managers believe their mobility costs will go up over the next 12 months, and 24 percent believe expenditures will rise by over 10 percent. The bulk of the increase is attributed to rise in the number of mobile users and employees’ expanding use of multiple devices.
How does your company compare? Get our report and find out.
The increased introduction of employee-owned smartphones/tablets to the workplace is great in many ways; the convenience, the productivity boost, the practicality, and yes, having more fun doing your job.
That does not mean the risks of doing so should be ignored.