With today’s employees wanting more control over the equipment they use for work, and employers looking for efficient ways to control technology costs across their businesses, it is hardly a wonder that ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) is seeing great growth in business today.

Technology advances are also such that you can share documents in a workplace Cloud, and have Cloud based printers so that even when an employee brings their device into the workplace, that the employer still has great controls.
Many people felt that the issues for BYOD were about how employees could access your companies systems and data in such a way that you would protect a business assets (often its’ processes and of course, its’ clients data), and be able to do that in a way that offered the speed and convenience of an employee’s home Wi-Fi.
Well, many of these issues are now gone, and BYOD is seeing some significant growth. In 2013, one survey highlighted that nearly 82% of companies provided for some kind of use by employees technology. If true, this is ahead of a Gartner survey which says that employers will expect 50% of their workforce to bring their own equipment by 2017.
Better, these employers see higher satisfaction, higher retention, greater engagement and lower costs when they do deploy a BYOD strategy.
What could possibly be wrong?
Well legal precedents are only just being set, and in a great report from Xerox blogs (Thorny Issues to consider before buying into BYOD), they paint a case where inappropriate behaviour was alleged and after a case was brought, it was attempted to be defended as the data was on technology not owned by the company.  This would have been a normal defence in the past, but the article explains that with the lines of personal and company being blurred, new case law is being defined.
Their final advice is to make sure that your policies and procedures are properly in place, and that you are truly aware of who owns what data, and what protection and guidance you can put into place.
This is great advice, and anyone who has BYOD, or is thinking of rolling it out, you can’t say you weren’t warned.