MARCH 2013: People love their smartphones and tablets so much — including all the touch conveniences, apps and Angry Birds that come with them — they want to use them all the time, including on the job.
So they do.
Four out of five employees use their personal devices for work, which make them happy and more productive. But how does it impact your business and network security?
Whether your company already has a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy or is still trying to figure out if it needs one, here are some stats about the growing tidal wave of mobile devices flooding into IT ecosystems that will have you leaping to attention:
- Percentage of Americans who use their personal mobile device for work: 81%
- Percentage who allow others to borrow their devices: 46%
- Percentage who store work email passwords on their phones: 35%
- Percentage who haven’t activated their auto-lock feature: 37%
- Current smartphone users across the globe: 1 billion
- Increase in number of smartphone users per year globally: 42%
- Smartphones and tablets sold in 2012: 821 million
- Projected sales of smartphones and tablets in 2013: 1.2 billion
- Percentage of devices shipped last year without a wired port: 50%
- Percentage of workers who say their organization has not yet implemented a BYOD policy: 66%
- Amount of BYOD activity that is going unmanaged: 80%
- Increase in employee productivity when using mobile apps: 45%
- Increase in mobile device malware detection across all platforms in one year: 155%
- Number of Android and iOS devices activated on 12/25/12: 17.4 million
- Increase of activations over Christmas Day 2011: 332%
- Android apps downloaded by end of 2011: 10 billion
- Personal mobile devices expected to be in use by 2020: 10 billion
The statistics come from Gartner, Ovum, IBM, Vertic, Flurry, Magic Software, Motorola and Harris Poll.
If you haven’t yet asked your team some key questions about your own BYOD plans, hop to it! You can get the best of both worlds — increased productivity and data that’s as secure as you can make it.
