Citrix announced results of a recent survey designed to assess how companies are responding to increasing pressure from employees who want to use personal smartphones, tablets and other devices for business use.
Their findings indicate that while many businesses lack policies for effectively managing employee’s personal devices at work, and in fact more than half of respondents said they were “unaware of all personal devices used for business purposes”, 38% of businesses do have a process or tool to manage and account for consumer devices. These companies have found that supporting use of personal devices encourages flexible work and brings productivity increases of 20% or more. Twenty-five percent of small and medium businesses actively support use of personal devices for business purposes. Not surprisingly, for 57% of respondents, security ranks as the #1 concern precluding them from adopting policies embracing use of personal devices.
While this survey was carried out among businesses, the same kinds of concerns and issues exist for universities, hospitals and research institutes, where IT support is often spread more thinly than in business environments.
YouGov and Research Now carried out the survey for Citrix between May 2011 and August 2011. They surveyed more than 1,100 senior executives and IT managers in Australia, France, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States.
