Bring-your-own-device strategies are the single most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing in a decade, according to a new study by Gartner.
One radical change BYOD is expected to spawn: By 2017, half of all employers will require workers to supply their own devices for work purposes. Also, Gartner says, enterprises that offer only corporately-owned smartphones or stipends to buy your own will soon become the exception to the rule.
As enterprise BYOD programs proliferate, 38% of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016 and let them use their own, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, Inc.'s Executive Programs.
BYOD adoption currently varies widely.
Companies in the United States are twice as likely to allow BYOD as those in Europe, where BYOD has the lowest adoption of all the regions. In contrast, employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work, according to Gartner.
The study also states that by 2015, the number of employees using mobile applications in the workplace will double. Today, roughly half of BYOD programs provide partial reimbursement.
Gartner believes that with mass-market adoption of BYOD and the steady decline in carrier fees, employers will gradually reduce subsidies. And as the number of workers using a mobile device expands, those who receive a subsidy will decline, according to David Willis, a distinguished analyst at Gartner.
"The enterprise should subsidize only the service plan on a smartphone," Willis said in a statement. "What happens if you buy a device for an employee and they leave the job a month later? How are you going to settle up? Better to keep it simple. The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs."
At the same time, employers recognize the benefits of BYOD, such as new mobile workforce opportunities, better employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs.
Gartner defines a BYOD plan as an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and others to use a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data. BYOD typically includes smartphones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs. It may or may not include a subsidy.
Security is the top BYOD concern, according to the Gartner study.
The risk of data leaks on mobile platforms is particularly acute today. Some mobile devices are designed to share data in the cloud and have no general-purpose file system for applications to share, increasing the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud.
