Tags: BYOD Consumerisation Enterprise Forrester-Research #consumerization #BYOD

Marlow, UK – 19th April 2012 - Trend Micro, today released new research, which shows that three quarters of enterprises have risen to the challenge of employees wanting to use their own devices at work by establishing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.

The research* conducted by Forrester on behalf of Trend Micro highlights the key pressures facing IT departments on one side as well as the business drivers and challenges associated with consumerization of IT in enterprises on the other.

The urgency of this combination seems to have led to a rather disparate understanding of the importance of implementing relevant BYOD policies.

While over half (60%) of enterprises surveyed had either already implemented or planned to implement a BYOD programme for smartphones as well as other devices such as tablets (47%) within the next twelve months, less than half of the respondents had formally documented any BYOD policies at all (46%), and only 46% had actually required employees to read and sign an official BYOD policy.

More alarmingly, the research highlights that the content and focus of these policies would seem to be somewhat incomplete in many cases, with key considerations such as security, risk and incident recovery making a rather poor showing in the enterprise BYOD mindset. For example, only around a third (34%) of organisations had evaluated the security implications of BYOD, or developed a mobile policy to protect the use of corporate data and applications (37%). A similarly low number of companies had updated their reimbursement policies for data (32%) and voice (31%) plans.

"It seems that while increasing numbers of organisations have bought into BYOD, the number of firms documenting policies associated with these programmes remains disconcertingly low", said James Walker Global Product Marketing Manager at Trend Micro. "In order for these programmes to be fully embraced, policies need to apply across all departments and clearly address critical elements such as security, data protection and privacy."

The research also highlighted a series of factors that seemed to be driving support for the design of BYOD programmes, including:

• An increase in overall staff productivity (70%)
• Access to corporate information for employees working remotely (63%)
• Enabling employees to use their personal devices such as smartphones and tablets for work activities (52%).
   

*Forrester conducted the BYOD research amongst 200 total respondents across the following regions: US, UK, France, Germany with 1000+ employees in US; 500+ employees in the UK, France and Germany
 

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