Bitglass Report: Employees, IT Teams Reject Traditional BYOD Policies, Curbing Overall Adoption

CAMPBELL, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 22, 2015) - Bitglass, the total data protection company, today announced the findings of its Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Security Report. The report was based on the results of two surveys examining 2,242 end users and mobile security administrators, who provided insights on BYOD adoption, challenges and overall effectiveness. The comprehensive report highlights that while most have interest in participating in BYOD, the vast majority of end users are resistant to Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) solutions, perceiving them as too restrictive or invasive to privacy. In addition, 40 percent of security administrators have chosen not to participate in the very same mobile policies that they are enforcing for their organization.

Overall, employee privacy has been a significant issue in more than one out of three organizations deploying MDM/MAM solutions for BYOD programs. In general, end users are challenging, and even rejecting, traditional MDM and MAM solutions, fearing their employer's ability to access, alter or delete personal data stored on their mobile devices. Underscoring this, 57 percent of employees, and 38 percent of IT professionals, are choosing not to participate in their company's BYOD program because they don't want their employer's IT department to have visibility into their personal data and applications. What's more, almost two thirds (64 percent) of employees would not participate in a program in which their employer had the ability to wipe their personal mobile device. While BYOD programs still have room to evolve and grow, the findings indicate the need for dramatic changes to previous approaches.

"By 2018, more than half of all bring your own device (BYOD) users that currently have an MDM agent will be managed by an agentless solution," according to Gartner's Rob Smith, John Girard, and Dionisio Zumerle, "How to Live With Unmanaged Devices," August 2015.

Yet despite lower-than-expected adoption, there remains a high interest in BYOD participation if the right conditions are met. A large majority (67 percent) of employees would participate in BYOD programs if their employers had the ability to protect corporate data but couldn't view, alter or delete their personal information and applications. Of IT professionals surveyed, 64 percent believe that their BYOD programs would be more successful without MDM hassles, such as installed agents and employer privacy challenges. Meanwhile, 44 percent of millennials said they would participate in BYOD programs in which employers have the ability to wipe their personal mobile device to protect proprietary information.

"BYOD holds great promise for employee productivity and cost savings, but architectural challenges introduced by the first wave of solutions have inhibited adoption," said Nat Kausik, CEO, Bitglass. "Going forward, BYOD programs must comprehensively address privacy concerns while allowing users to maintain control over their personal data. Agentless, data-centric mobile security solutions solve these challenges and represent the next-generation of mobile security."

Other Key Findings Include:

• MAM is DOA. Despite a huge push by enterprise mobility management vendors to become the de facto standard for mobile management, only nine percent of organizations have deployed a MAM solution. A little more than a third (36 percent) of enterprises use MDM solutions.
• For some, the solution has been to gamble with the security of their data. 28 percent of organizations are doing nothing to protect corporate data on mobile devices.

A full download of the report can be found here: http://pages.bitglass.com/Bitglass_BYOD_Security_report_2015.html

A Bitglass mobile security demonstration video, "So Easy a 5-year Old Can Do It," can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w6rDm22waQ

About Bitglass
Bitglass (bitglass.com) is a Cloud Access Security Broker that delivers innovative technologies that transcend the network perimeter to deliver total data protection for the enterprise -- in the cloud, at access, on mobile devices, on the network and anywhere on the Internet. Bitglass was founded in 2013 by a team of industry veterans with a proven track record of innovation and execution. Bitglass is based in Silicon Valley.