Business Putting Data In Harm's Way With Lax BYOD Policies: IDC

IDC has released the latest findings from IDC End Users Bring Your Own Devices Survey. It reveals that the majority of businesses are now implementing BYOD for media tablets and smartphones. Approximately two-thirds of businesses have moved away from corporate-liable policies which is the practice of issuing devices to employees through a formal and typically central procurement process. The majority of businesses have embraced a culture of BYOD where employees purchase their own devices, bring them into the company, expense through informal processes and look to the IT department for support. While this is happening, an alarming number of businesses have no formal policy for managing the BYOD trend. Some 55 percent have no formal BYOD policy for smartphones, 49 percent have none for tablets and 41 percent of businesses have none laptops. While most businesses appear to be in a discovery phase, there are still small pockets which ignore the issue outright. In the interim, corporate data is more exposed to a host of security vulnerabilities from malware attacks to exposing an untold number of endpoints to corporate data.

Another observation is that IT can also report savings by passing on the costs of purchasing and even managing devices to employees. However few businesses factor in the IT resources drawn into supporting BYOD fleets whether it is meant to or not. Employees are finding ways to expense their communication costs elsewhere. This means businesses are still incurring large hidden costs which have no way of being measured. As a result there is no way to calculate Return on Investment (ROI). The only given is that data is inherently less secure.

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In Australia, IDC surveyed 250 participants from businesses all sizes and industries. This included employee views by roles: manager (e.g., middle management, VP, director), specialists, which require high-performance computing (e.g., graphic designer, engineer); content producers (e.g., product, marketing managers); and mobile employees (e.g., sales associated, consultants, field workers). These results were then cross referenced with results in six other countries (i.e., India, Indonesia, Korea, China, Singapore, and Thailand), as well as multiple face-to-face discussions with IT leaders. The results were also correlated with previous surveys. In total, this BYOD survey canvassed around 1,800 survey respondents across the region. The survey also reveals how employees interact with devices across all form factors, workloads they each support, and relationship with IT departments. For example, e-mail is the killer app for smartphones, audio and video conferencing is being used on tablets, and laptops still hold an edge over tablets on content creation and consumption. Accessing email, creating, and reviewing documents are the three most important tasks for laptops, scoring evenly at 20 percent.

In the survey, IDC has also asked employees to identify the current device brands they use and devices they ‘prefer for work’ purposes if given the choice. The survey revealed that Apple led in the brand preference in the smartphone and tablets, Dell and Toshiba for desktops. However if employees were able to given the option to choose their device, Blackberry-based product came up as a top pick in 21 percent of the cases outscoring nearly all brands. This suggests that not only does Blackberry have significant mindshare and presence in the enterprise, but IT should not make assumptions on employees’ preferences and a survey should be carried out. The results for Blackberry were consistent across all countries. Blackberry scored highest in the financial services sector.

“If this survey had one takeaway, the majority of businesses have jettisoned from corporate-liable policies, and BYOD is in the clear majority. However, nearly half of these businesses have no formal policy and this makes corporate very vulnerable,” says Dustin Kehoe, Associate Director of IDC’s Australia Telecommunications Research. “The one surprise is if employees were given the choice of a personal device for work, BlackBerry is a top pick across all form factors including tablets and desktops. If this reflects sentiment, then it is therefore reasonable to assume that if employees were given a stipend to buy the devices they needed for work, the market share of brands in the enterprise could shift dramatically.”