Citrix Survey – Organizations Are Realizing Significant Benefits by Adopting “Bring Your Own” Device Policies

I came across the press release from the vmblog.com site (thanks guys) and I thought it was of interest. Today Citrix released the results  of their Bring-Your-Own (BYO) Index revealing that 92 percent of IT organizations are aware that employees are using their own devices in the workplace and 94 percent intend to have a formal BYO policy in place by mid-2013, up from 44 percent today.

“There are two reasons that BYO is being embraced within organizations,” stated Mick Hollison, vice president, Desktop Marketing & Strategy, for Citrix. “There are those that are using BYO to keep up with the rapid consumerization of enterprise IT and then there are forward-thinking CIOs who have embraced BYO as a way to attract the best talent, encourage a flexible working environment and raise productivity levels.”

I do agree with these results as the amount of broadness of devices, especially mobile devices people are using continues to grow the workplace needs to adapt as well.  As the survey indicated Desktop Virtualization is the Key Enabler for this evolution and that it true. As workplace users have the need for different device access desktop virtualization will be the foundation to provide that. That’s why I believe it is one of the big frontiers in virtualization going forward.  The other point from the survey is that the Evolution of Devices will be the Driver and that makes sense as well.

Other Key Findings

• The primary benefits of BYO are improved employee satisfaction at 57 percent, increased worker productivity at 52 percent, greater mobility for workers at 51 percent, more flexible work environments for employees at 46 percent and reduced IT costs at 36 percent.
• Forty-four percent of organizations intend to pay employees a stipend roughly equivalent to the cost of its own IT department procuring and managing a comparable device and 31 percent plan to help offset some of the cost.
• Ninety four percent of IT decision makers indicated that the introduction of a BYO policy has predominantly been led by the IT department.  They also noted that other departments are getting involved in the development of BYO policies with Human Resources participating in 39 percent of organizations, Legal in 35 percent and Finance departments in 29 percent.  

Citrix Press Release – Bring-Your-Own (BYO) Index

Citrix Survey White paper

Pete