Ascent Index: BYOD (June 6 – June 20)

We know bringing your own device to work (that’s ‘BYOD’ for most of us) is a hot topic right now  – and getting hotter. Over the past two weeks alone, the term had nearly 22,000 mentions on social networks which is a 10 percent increase over the first half of the month.

One reason for the uptick could be the latest Fortinet study, which found that more than half of workers in their twenties believe it is their “right” rather than a privilege to use their own mobile devices at work. One data point we found very compelling was that one out of three respondents said they would gladly break any anti-BYOD policy, and “contravene a company’s security policy that forbids them to use their personal devices at work or for work purposes.”

Clearly IT departments are facing huge challenges trying to enforce their company’s BYOD policies. An interesting start-up, ContentRaven (who also will be joining us at our inaugural B2B IT Forum), recently wrote a great post about establishing your organization’s BYOD policy, which recommends outlining employee responsibilities and how they can mitigate the risks to their devices.  Another idea is to have companies offer monthly stipends that can be reimbursed for only the mobile devices and/or platforms that have been approved by the organization.

Below is a word cloud showing the most common words associated with BYOD: security, privilege, control and others that illustrate many of the challenges facing IT departments and employees when finding a common ground on corporate policies for using personal devices for work.

BYOD is not the only challenge haunting IT departments that are faced with a broader trend towards more employee-centric operating models. Another vivid example is cloud document sharing and collaboration, which first raised IT red flags with the unapproved and insecure usage of Dropbox amongst many individual corporate users.  Disruptions like this are ideal opportunities for start-ups to emerge with solutions. Earlier this year we made an investment in CloudLock, which delivers enterprise-class security for companies embracing cloud collaboration. Security is a core area of investment for us and we will continue to closely monitor trends like BYOD and the opportunities that arise there.