6 Corporate BYOD Stats To Worry IT Professionals

Not Quite Mobile

Most business organizations just aren't realizing the full productivity potential of mobility and the BYOD trend, according to a new study by Blue Coat Systems released Tuesday.

Here, we take a look at some of the key findings regarding consumerization, BYOD, mobile computing, applications and productivity gains. Blue Coat surveyed 350 respondents all over the world and qualified respondents who worked at organizations of at least 2,000 employees in the U.S., 500 employees in Canada and 250 employees in all other countries.

Email Is Tops

Not surprisingly, email is the application ranked highest among applications that IT administrators said they would allow access to via an employee-owned device. About 83 percent of administrators listed email in the Blue Coat survey, followed by 56 percent who said they would allow messaging.

Limited Applications

Email and instant messaging may be allowed, but far fewer IT administrators said they allow access to business productivity applications like ERP (31 percent), sales force automaton (24 percent) and supply chain management (19 percent).

Reality Check

According to Blue Coat, nearly twice as many employees -- 71 percent -- report accessing the network with their personal device than IT administrators believe are doing so. The IT administrator number is 37 percent.

A Bigger Divide

Blue Coat reported that 88 percent of employees think their mobile device is "somewhat or very secure from malware." Only about 22 percent of IT professionals, however, think the risk of malware spreading from employee devices to the corporate network is minimal or no risk.

Be Flexible

Most organizations haven't yet solved the "my phone, my rules" challenge, according to Blue Coat. IT may have higher, stricter expectations for security controls on personal devices, but employees are making them meet in the middle, which has resulted in the creation of flexible policies that implement security only when corporate assets are at risk.

Restricted Access

Not surprisingly, far more IT staffers (37 percent) than employees (12 percent) want to allow restrictions on the type of sites or content that can be accessed, as part of a corporate policy.