People have long been known to work from home on their personal computer or pick up work emails on their mobile, but research shows that this is on the rise. With more employees using their own devices for work purposes, 2014 could be the year of the BYOD boom.
BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, is the name for remote working initiatives that more and more businesses and corporations are choosing to adopt. Also known as BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), BYOP (Bring Your Own Phone), and BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC), BYOD refers to the company policy that permits employees to bring their personal mobile devices to the workplace for work purposes, including accessing the company’s private information and apps (source).
According to statistics from the same source, BYOD is a growing trend in the business world, with significant adoption. In Brazil, 75 percent employees bring their own device to work; in Russia, 44 percent employees are using their own tech at work. Furthermore, a recent research by Ovum indicated that 57% of full time employees are using personal devices (from laptops to smartphones) to access company data.
As the infographic by Egnyte shows, 78% of businesses have found that double the amount of BYODs are connecting to the corporate network than they did two years previously.
For more BYOD facts, check out the infographic:
Unlike company hardware, employees are likely to have different devices, using different operating systems. As the infographic shows, iOS devices were found to be more commonly used amongst employees for business file sharing than devices using the Android OS.
As more people have more devices to use even if it’s only for accessing work emails, 65% of employees find that their smartphone is their most relied-upon device, with the iPhone 5 proving to be the most popular.
There are some visible benefits of embracing the BYOD policy: 67 percent of organizations report that they have seen significant cost savings since allowing employees to use their own devices for work. This translates into $2 billion annual savings. With regard to employees’ productivity, the survey reveals that employees gain 9 hours of out-of-office productivity per week.
However, BYOD is not without risks. Significant risks, I must say.
With remote working on the rise, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses and corporations to manage company data – making remote working and BYOD in the workplace something of a security risk. Only 30% of companies have a policy to monitor BYOD and 21% don’t have any kind of policy regarding BYOD access.
Takeaway
You need to be careful NOT to let BYOD compromise your company data security. What you should do is to develop a BYOD policy that enables you to embrace BYOD with zero-percent-risk, while keeping your company’s data 100 percent accessible to anyone.