No Longer a Trade-Off: Productivity vs. Security
We live in a world where our jobs demand continually increasing output, which usually results in adding extra hours to the workday. To preserve work/life balance, employees tend to latch onto the latest tools and devices to quickly ease business processes for seamless collaboration and faster output. But this can come at a cost to companies with unsecure devices and consumer applications moving into our everyday business routine.While the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is not new, IT still struggles to stay up-to-date on the latest apps and devices to figure out where their data is going and who can access it. We’ve known about the issue of consumerization of IT and the productivity vs. security trade-off in the U.S., but having recently expanded into the U.K., Egnyte wanted to see if companies across the pond also face similar issues. We surveyed 2,000 adults in the U.K. to get a pulse on how this trend is impacting these organizations. Let’s take a look at some of the findings:Increased output: Each week, U.K. employees conduct an additional 3-4 hours of work from home! People today practically wear their mobile devices by having them at all times. So, why not just double-check that your client hasn’t sent you files to review after (maybe during) dinner, before bed and first thing in the morning from that same device that you carried all day long?Greater flexibility: This trend offers workers greater flexibility, giving them the freedom to catch up on work that they couldn’t complete during normal working hours. 48% of respondents reported that they choose to work from home because of this catch-up issue.More Options: More than half of respondents (55%) use their own personal laptops to access work files, and an even greater number of U.K. workers use their personal mobile devices to complete projects for work. Businesses are probably providing the wrong types of tools, which is pushing employees to use personal devices over company-owned ones.
The survey and recent trends unveil that additional employee flexibility, specifically around BYOD, can introduce new challenges and levels of complexity. Yes, companies gain more hours and productivity out of their teams, but then those employees are also working too many hours. To solve the prolonged workday issue, employees tend to leverage tools (mostly not IT sanctioned) to create workarounds for time-consuming tasks, while IT is struggling to keep up.Businesses need to strike a balance. Give employees the flexibility and the tools they need to be productive and time efficient, without putting your business data at risk. There are solutions that exist to eliminate data slipping into the wrong app or device, but it’s important to stay ahead of the problem. Provide users with IT- and user-friendly tools to keep both sides of the business happy.Interested in learning how to manage data going into unsecure devices and applications to eliminate shadow IT? Check out this on-demand webinar that Egnyte recently hosted on the topic with our partner Netskope.
