Study: Employees bringing more apps to work
A new study out from LogMeIn may make business owners think twice about how their employees are working – solo and in groups – on the Internet. That is because about 70% of businesses have some ‘BYOA’ – bring your own app – presence. This even though many IT departments say only about 2.8 apps are ‘brought in’ to a business; in truth, the LogMeIn study estimates about 21 apps are BYOA.
While not all these apps are harmful, some can put business data at risk.
According to the report:
• 64% of employees are BYOA even if their work has a similar solution in place
• 59% of employee introduced collaboration apps are adopted
• 67% employee introduced remote access apps are adopted
• 81% of businesses say they’ll have a BYOA policy in place over the next two years
• 39% of businesses aren’t managing BYOA at all
What is maybe more startling about the study is that fewer than half of employees (45%) are consulting IT prior to bringing a new app into their workplace; meanwhile, about 30% of the time managers are provisioning apps rather than IT departments.
What are workers looking for in apps? More than half (56%) want mobile friendly apps while about 54% want simpler file sharing options.
As for how businesses are dealing with the introduction of new apps, more than one-third aren’t dealing with it at all while 30% say they ‘manage BYOA’ by blocking apps and 29% say they analyze traffic logs and use monitoring devices to ensure BYOAs aren’t a danger to the company.