Embracing “Bring Your Own Device”: Balancing the Risks of Security Breaches with the Benefits of Agile Work Practices

Background

A recent survey by Avenade (2012) of more than 600 executives, business unit leaders and IT decision-makers across 17 countries examined the extent to which the younger generation of workers are influencing the consumerisation of IT, their brand preferences, and the willingness of business leaders to embrace the BYOD trend. In short, this report dispels the myth that IT professionals and business leaders are resisting the consumerisation of IT and the trend towards acceptance of BYOD. On the contrary, it appears that more and more enterprises are embracing these notions and are incorporating BYOD into their ongoing business practices. The report also illustrates a pervasive shift in the use of consumer technologies in the workplace and significant IT investments being made to manage this trend. Globally, 88% of executives report that employees are using their own personal computing technologies for business purposes today. These findings are consistent with those of a number of other industry reports. A recent international survey of CIOs by Gartner (2013) found that 38% of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016. The trend is even more pronounced in “high-growth” developing markets (e.g. Brazil, Russia, India, UAE, Malaysia) where 75% of employees use their own device at work, as opposed to about 44% in the more developed nations (Ovum, 2012).