Study: Mobile application management a necessity as BYOD catches on

By Jonathan Dale 11 Jun 2012

byod, consumerization, file sharing

The secret to handling the consumerization of IT is proper planning. Although the technology is available to help IT manage the trend, there are still some things to take into account when looking for solutions.

Business leaders and IT personnel should assume their employees will use personal devices for work, even if the company doesn't support the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend. According to a recent ZDNet article, "more than 50 percent of employees use portable devices to take confidential data out of their companies every day." Mobile device management solutions can enforce data protection and security policies for all of these portable devices.

The news from ZDNet is even more troubling for businesses that lack management solutions for mobile devices. The BYOD trend has become more than a passing fad, with more and more employees bringing their devices to work. Additionally, businesses using traditional management solutions are facing a problem with employees accessing unauthorized programs through the company's network.

BYOD creates need for mobile application management

Research from the cloud collaboration software company SkyDox indicates BYOD has remained a strong workplace trend across a range of industries. Seventy-seven percent of information workers, 92 percent of professional services workers and 86 percent of employees in the financial services industry use their own mobile devices at work.

The survey uncovered a challenge IT faces from the BYOD trend: managing the applications employees are using at work. Sixty-six percent of respondents use free file-sharing programs, and 55 percent of these workers use unauthorized file-sharing programs.

"There is an increasing need for workers to share information seamlessly and efficiently beyond the corporate firewall, with distributed teams and while one the move," said Ali Moinuddin, CMO of SkyDox. "There is also, however, an increasing proclivity for those same workers not to realize the potential dangers they are putting their company in by doing so with tools not sanctioned by their IT department. The burden now falls on IT departments to provide tools to enable collaboration and file-sharing, without compromising corporate and legal policies surrounding data security."

Although it is important for IT to implement tools to meet employee demands, it's also crucial to have control over the applications running on the network. Mobile application management solutions answer that need by allowing IT to track and control access to mobile apps.

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