A CDW study published in October 2012 finds that, “small businesses get a competitive lift from their employees’ use of
mobile devices and that employees mostly deliver it by bringing their own smartphones, tablets and even laptops to their jobs, with small business IT managers working to catch up.”
Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD as it’s known, is a logical evolutionary step in the ‘consumerization of IT’ process, which we’ve seen gain substantial momentum since the PC revolution of the mid-to-late 1990s allowed companies to begin providing desktop workstations for their employees.
According to a recent ZDNet article, “Consumerization of IT, BYOD and mobile device management,” which discusses BYOD in terms of enterprises but which also is relevant to small businesses, the percentage of enterprises that support BYOD increased from 72 to 76 percent between 2011 and 2012.
But what are those companies doing to ensure data security?
As stated in the ZDNet piece, “Consumerization of IT is not going away, so enterprise IT managers cannot simply bury their heads in the sand. The challenge is to accommodate the ‘work anywhere, anytime’ productivity and user satisfaction benefits that consumerization and BYOD can bring, while retaining enough control to keep company data secure and compliance requirements satisfied.”
And according to the CDW study, their survey found that the current downside to BYOD is that “Just half of small business IT managers believe their company has an effective strategy to manage mobile devices.”
I encourage you to read the CDW and ZDNet pieces to which I’ve linked from this post, and keep checking the Office Solutions blog for future updates on the ways in which Xerox helps small businesses evolve in tandem with the latest workplace technology trends and developments.
The CDW study that says, ‘small businesses get a competitive lift from their employees use of mobile devices’ – is spot on. Our hospital put a BYOD policy in place to use Tigertext for HIPAA complient text messaging, mostly to deal with the reality that the doctors were sending patient data over regular SMS which is not HIPAA compliant. The reality was that the doctors were doing this because it was more efficient for them. Now we have the doctor using HIPAA compliant tigertext and the patient processing productivity doubled in the last quarter – a significent business advantage. Yes, BYOD is a big security issue, and yes their are real productivity gain to be had, but IT is going to have to be creative to get them and maintain security.
Excellent comment, Shelly. I love hearing about productivity gains due to the implementation of leading-edge technologies by progressive-minded companies. Especially in the healthcare industry, where more widely adopted efficiencies would help everyone save time and money. Thanks for posting!