The Dictatorship of BYOD

CIOs are no strangers to high-pressure jobs. They are used to the pressure that comes from trying to keep up with the demands on their IT organizations. But now the pressure is ratcheting up even higher as they find themselves relentlessly challenged by the consumeration of IT and the proliferation of BYOD environments.

According to a new study of 150 North American enterprise CIOs done by Mezeo Software entitled "2012 CIO Enterprise Cloud Data Mobility & Security Survey," the new CIO bottom line is simple to describe and exceedingly difficult to remedy: "In a turbulent business environment, how can the CIO protect company data assets and ensure employees have the real-time infrastructure required to succeed?"

Survey results clearly indicate the criticality of protecting company assets. In response to the question "How worried are you about public cloud (i.e. users using consumer-based tools to store corporate data)?," more than 80 percent of respondents rated their concern as eight or higher on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest level of concern.

Digging deeper, the survey targeted respondents who answered five or higher on the previous question to describe their biggest concerns, and the two overwhelming answers were "loss of control (e.g. employee leaves data on public cloud)", and "data loss (via lost encryption keys, etc.)."

In response to the question "What causes data leaks onto public clouds," the answer was a predictable, "BYOD and personal decision-making by employees." It should be noted that not a single person checked off the box for "There is no data leakage onto public clouds."

Despite the seemingly imminent malaise, only 42 percent of respondents said they were actively preventing data from being stored on public clouds, which prompted the study to ask why is it that even though there is so much concern about data leakage, only 42 percent of respondents are taking action against it?

Reason one for this apparent apathy is that respondents can't find an option that keeps data behind their firewalls, and reason two is the inability to mandate that users stop using consumer tools and public clouds. Reason two comes across as the elephant in the room. Just as massive amounts of PCs slipped in the back door unabated some 30 years ago, so again another technology tsunami is rolling in unchecked, and it is clearly represents the future of personal and professional communications.

Mezeo, of course, has the solution to this runaway rout, saying, "You can implement a secure file sync and share a solution that gives your users what they want and need to remain mobile and efficient, but puts IT in control."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/06/2012 at 12:48 PM