As many as 73% of UK businesses admit they have no formal BYOD corporate policy and support structure, a report by Accellion has found.
UK users list the ability to share and access files while on the move in their top three demands of mobile working. The report found that only 53% of companies currently allow staff to access and share files on the move when using work devices. It also discovered that 22% of UK businesses encourage users to use ad-hoc solutions such as Dropbox despite the known security risks.
40% of UK companies surveyed said that they allowed mobile users to use public cloud services, although 26% allow use for only non-sensitive documents and data. Throughout the rest of Europe, IT is even further behind, with 75% of European companies using consumer grade file-sharing tools for work, as opposed to 46% in the UK.
The UK is also leading the way in mobile deployment across Europe, with more mobile devices deployed per organisation and more support for employee-owned devices. In the UK, 17% of workers have three or more mobile devices for work use. Only 22% of UK businesses do not support mobile devices, compared to 35% of European companies.
Paul Steiner, MD, Europe, Middle East and Africa at Accellion, said: "Despite months of headlines related to the NSA PRISM program, businesses are operating a laissez faire approach to the security of their data in the cloud. Dealing with the whirlwind pace of mobile innovation is not just a security challenge for IT, it demands board-level scrutiny. Employees are now savvy enough technologically to seek out their own solutions, but then businesses must deal with the fallout when these solutions cause security breaches."
