Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 01 | Page 96

FINAL WORD in Between, which was published by Mobile Work Exchange in January 2014. Similar challenges can also be observed outside of the public sector, in areas such as financial services, healthcare, retail and many others. This is putting immense pressure on IT teams that want to deliver a flexible, and satisfying, experience for employees and customers via mobile devices, whilst ensuring the environment is safe, secure and compliant. A global study of 140 IT professionals that are registered on TechTarget Web communities shared a number of eyeopening insights on the challenges they face. Nearly 90% of the respondents said their organisations support a BYOD policy but barely half said that it is an official program within their organisation. The use of convenient cloud-based services was also found to be widespread among respondents’ end users, however fewer than half the respondents said they officially support those services. Malware, lost/stolen devices, accessing inappropriate content and using social media platforms are the biggest 96 INTELLIGENTCIO concerns respondents said they have with the increased use of mobile devices in the workplace. Seven in ten of the respondents also said that the increased use of mobile devices by employees and customers has significantly or moderately raised their organisation’s risk profile. Similarly, almost every respondent said that providing an enhanced user experience through mobile device usage has had a negative impact on security and compliance. ADDITIONALLY, MANY RESPONDENTS SAID THAT IT IS IMPORTANT FOR ORGANISATIONS TO USE AUDIT-TRAIL SOFTWARE OR SERVICES TO TRACK EMPLOYEES’ ACCESS TO ONLINE OR CLOUD APPLICATIONS Mobility and BYOD are no longer just concepts and trends, they are a fact of life for many organisations and IT professionals around the world. The study found that 87% of the respondents indicated that their organisation has some kind of BYOD policy. At the same time, the study found that only 54% of the respondent’s organisations actually had a formailised BYOD policy that was driven by IT. Furthermore, 19% of the respondents said that their organisations had informal BYOD policies that were driven equally by IT and users, whereas 14% said that it was entirely driven by users. Only www.intelligentcio.com