BYOD In the Enterprise
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 Chris Witeck, Director Product MarketingWe just recently announced the results of our annual Mobile Enterprise Report. Unlike our Mobile Workforce Report (which focuses on the mobile worker and is published quarterly), the Mobile Enterprise Report is an annual survey that focuses on senior level IT professionals and the trends impacting them and the Enterprises they work for. This year we teamed up with MobileIron to survey 477 IT professionals between December 2012 and January 2013.
As you can imagine this serves as a nice contrast to the Mobile Workforce Report- where we can compare trends as experienced by IT to those experienced by the workers themselves. We know from the Mobile Workforce Report just how important BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become to the workers, but how has BYOD impacted the policies that Enterprises have in place and what devices that are supported?
Part 1 of our Mobile Enterprise Report blog will focus on just this- BYOD Policies and Trends.
This year’s Mobile Enterprise Report is the second time we’ve had a chance to survey IT professionals and this allows us to compare responses from 2011 to what we collected at the end of 2012.
One question we asked is how corporate guidelines have changed in regards to personal devices. You can definitely see the trend shifting over just one year’s time to where less organizations say they don’t allow access from personal devices (26% in 2011 to 19% in 2012) and more saying they have changed their guidelines to be more accommodating to personal devices (47% in 2011 to 56% in 2012). In fact, if you add together those who say they have historically allowed access from personal devices to those who said they recently changed their guidelines to be more accommodating, you get 81% saying they allow access from personal devices. So this definitely mirrors the BYOD trends we see from the mobile workers.
One interesting wrinkle to this, while 81% say they accommodate personal devices, we asked in a separate question if the organization had established BYOD policies in place and 54% said yes. While this is encouraging to see the majority of organizations putting a policy in place, it is clear that there are quite a few organizations that accommodate personal devices but have yet to translate this to a formal BYOD policy. While having a policy in place is not a cure-all for managing costs and security, it can go a long way to make sure employees know what is expected of them.
The last point I’ll touch on in today’s blog is that with some of the questions we can definitely see regional variances at play. Something I’ve noticed when looking at user data as well as talking to our customers is that European customers are less likely to be supporting BYOD than customers in North America. That is something we see reflected in the data with regards to BYOD policies. North American organizations were much more likely to have a BYOD policy (58%) than a European organization (46%).
This is just a small portion of the data available in the report. Download the report to go deeper on these trends and others.
We will also be hosting an informative webinar to cover the details of the report with MobileIron. Be sure to check back tomorrow when we talk more about the highlights of this year’s Mobile Enterprise Report.
Webinar: The Impact Mobile Workers and Devices have on your Enterprise. Make sure to register even if you cannot attend. We will send you the recording link.
