Bitglass partnered with a leading cybersecurity community and surveyed IT professionals to understand how their businesses have enabled the use of personal devices, what their BYOD security concerns and challenges are, and what actions they have taken to protect data in an increasingly remote and flexible work environment.
As the shift to remote work has increased, most businesses are embracing BYOD in the workplace. 69% of respondents said that employees at their companies are allowed to use personal devices to perform their work, while some enable BYOD for contractors, partners, customers, and suppliers. While the use of personal devices in the work environment is growing rapidly, many are unprepared to balance security with productivity. When asked for their main BYOD security concerns, 63% of respondents said data leakage, 53% said unauthorised access to data and systems, and 52% said malware infections.
Despite the concerns, the research shows that organisations are allowing BYOD without taking the proper steps to protect corporate data. About half of the surveyed organisations lack any visibility into file sharing apps (51%), 30% have no visibility or control over mobile enterprise messaging tools, and only 9% have cloud-based anti-malware solutions in place. Compounding these problems are results that demonstrated that organisations need physical access to devices and even device PINs to secure them. This may be acceptable for managed endpoints, but it is a clear invasion of privacy where BYOD is enabled.
“The top two reasons enterprises hesitate to enable BYOD relate to company security and employee privacy,” said Anurag Kahol, CTO of Bitglass. “However, the reality is that today’s work environment requires the flexibility and remote access that the use of personal devices enables. To remedy this standoff, companies need comprehensive cloud security platforms that are designed to secure any interaction between users, devices, apps, or web destinations.”
