Using one's own device at work may pose a threat to company's data, but Indian enterprises seem to be embracing the trend with as many as 80% employees surveyed saying their companies allow them to bring their personal mobile phones and laptops to work.
According to a research by services provider BT, 80% of the Indian employees surveyed said their employers permitted them to connect their personal devices to corporate network and use them for work.
The research is based on survey of more than 2,000 users and decision makers across 11 countries, including India.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a recent trend where employees bring personally-owned devices to work place and use them to access company resources like email, file servers, and databases.
However, there are concerns of data being breached. For example, when an employee loses his/her personal device used for accessing the company network, the confidential data stored on the phone could be accessed by third parties.
Those surveyed seemed well informed about the risks that BYOD presents as 89% said "putting 24/7 access to corporate systems into the hands of an increasingly mobile workforce is now the main threat to IT security."
The research added that "the adoption of BYOD brings to light new security issues."
BT said IT decision makers now need to tackle a wider range of issues such as security concerns, increased data usage expenditure, potential threat to intellectual property and the cost of infrastructure for multiple devices, before introducing BYOD at the workplace.
The security concerns, in fact, may not be totally unfounded as 73% of the IT respondents said they have experienced security breaches due to people bringing in unauthorised devices.
Meanwhile, the research also pointed out that 65% of the employees feel that BYOD enables them to serve customers better.
In fact, 51% of the employees said they felt "more efficient and productive" by using a personally-owed device for work.
