Business is having difficulty keeping up with employee use of personal apps at work according to a study from technology analyst firm Telsyte.
The company's Australian enterprise mobility market study 2014 surveyed about 460 CIOs and ICT decision makers on their organisation’s approach to bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own apps (BYOA) .
It revealed that two-thirds of Australian businesses have employees that use bring your own apps (BYOA) but only 27 per cent of organisations allow unrestricted use.
Telsyte said around 34 per cent do not allow BYOA at all and enforce this restriction with tactical approaches such as management tools.
Within companies that do allow or tolerate the use of BYOA, 30 per cent of staff actively use their own apps for work.
Telsyte senior analyst, Rodney Gedda, said there is a lot of interest in the BYOD trend, but many organisations have overlooked the apps that enter the workplace on personal devices.
Gedda noted that many of these apps can be a danger to business. Not because they are malicious in nature, but because of the sensitive information that staff may share or save with them. He said this is an aspect of BYOD that is largely being overlooked.
“Couple this with thousands of mobile apps, for both personal and business handsets, and the plethora of cloud services available via mobile devices and the Web, and people are creating a new form of shadow-IT with BYOA.”
According to limited information released by Telsyte, popular personal apps used for business include: email (gmail or Apple’s mail app); cloud storage services (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive); calendaring; collaboration (GoTo Meeting, WebEx); voice communication (Skype); project and task management (Remember The Milk); productivity (Pages, QuickOffice Pro); multimedia; and note taking (Evernote).
