Organizations with large legacy technology infrastructures are no longer able to maintain even a semblance of security on mobile devices. As consumer technology rapidly outpaces standard organizational tech, IT departments have been forced to directly confront the growing BYOD trend. Instead of fighting the trend, more and more companies are looking for ways to turn this to their advantage. According to a recently released Gartner report (subscription), nearly 40% of companies will cease giving employees any devices and will expect employees to use their own personally purchased technology to access data necessary to do their jobs. Even today, nearly half of companies in the United States are beginning to implement financial reimbursement programs in lieu of fully company-subsidized communications.
On the consumer side, while this may sound like your typical “business crushing the consumer,” it’s actually what is happening naturally. It is a trend that has until now been resisted by companies and been driven by consumers, and is one that actually hands considerably more flexibility to employees than what they have enjoyed in the past. On the business side, fewer resources are having to be devoted to the administration of voice and data plans, internal customer care, with more resources able to be devoted to development of services and infrastructure to support BYOD.
All that said, many companies are forging ahead into this brave new BYOD world with absolutely no plan or knowledge of how to allow employees to use their devices for work, while maintaining flexible platforms that allow for secure collaboration and technological evolution. It is critical that organizations of all sizes take time to examine their plans for mobile IT, and build meaningful mobile strategies that will stand strong against the unpredictable waves of consumer technology.
