SANS Survey: BYOD Widespread But Lacking Sufficient Oversight

BlackBerry is still the No. 1 supported mobile device in organizations

Most organizations allow bring-your-own mobile devices for their employees, but close to half of these enterprises dont have a complete picture of what mobile devices their users are carrying.
Even more troubling: More than half either dont or sort of have BYOD policies, according to SANS First Annual Survey on Mobility Security, which was sponsored by Bradford Networks, MobileIron, and HP Enterprise Security Products. The survey polled some 500 IT professionals to gauge the type and depth of mobile-device usage that organizations are allowing their employees to use for work, and how they manage them security-wise.
SANS will reveal the full findings
in a Webcast on April 12
.
Just less than 10 percent say they are fully aware of the mobile devices in their network.
More than 60 percent of organizations today allow staff to bring their own devices, said Kevin Johnson, SANS senior instructor and author of the survey report. With this type of permissiveness, policies and controls are even more important to help secure our environments.
But organizations arent keeping up policy- and security-wise with allowing users to bring their own iPads, smartphones, or other devices, the survey found. Some 17 percent say they have stand-alone BYOD security and usage policies; 24 percent say they have these policies added to their existing policies; 26 percent say they sort of have policies; 3 percent dont know; and 31 percent say they do not have any BYOD policies.
BlackBerry may be floundering in the consumer space, but its still the most supported mobile device in businesses, with nearly 75 percent of the respondents saying they support BlackBerry, followed by iPhone (68 percent), iPad (63 percent), and Android (53 percent).
Not surprisingly, they worry most about Android, which they consider the riskiest to support, the survey shows.
More than half say employee education is one way they secure the devices, and 73 percent include user education with other security policies. Among the topics covered in their policies are authentication (around 70 percent), acceptable usage/employee education (around 65 percent), email accounts (more than 60 percent), and configuration (less than 60 percent). Stored data and malware protection were included in about half of the organizations policies, and application policies were in just more than 40 percent of the cases.
Have a comment on this story? Please click Add Your Comment below. If youd like to contact
Dark Readings
editors directly,
send us a message
.

Last News
▸ ArcSight prepares for future at user conference post HP acquisition. ◂ Discovered: 07/01/2025 Category: security	▸ Samsung Epic 4G: First To Use Media Hub ◂ Discovered: 07/01/2025 Category: security	▸ Many third-party software fails security tests ◂ Discovered: 07/01/2025 Category: security

**Cyber Security Categories**
Google Dorks Database	Exploits Vulnerability	Exploit Shellcodes

CVE List

Tools/Apps

News/Aarticles

Phishing Database

Deepfake Detection

Trends/Statistics & Live Infos

Tags:
SANS Survey: BYOD Widespread But Lacking Sufficient Oversight