Confidential Data Is Leaving on Workers’ Mobile Devices

More than half of employees admit to storing, sharing and working on corporate documents on their personal devices—and this number is growing. You might want to re-read that statement. It’s a doozy.

If you think your BYOD policy telling employees that they can’t put sensitive data on their personal smartphones, laptops and tablets is keeping your company safe, think again. Few office workers are actually aware of their company’s BYOD policy.

These are the alarming findings from a recent survey of 4,000 office workers in the United States and United Kingdom, conducted by market researcher Ipsos Mori and commissioned by cloud collaboration platform provider Huddle.

[ Slideshow: 10 BYOD Worker Types ]

If you’re not in the BYOD game, you’ve still got problems. The survey found that 73 percent of respondents in the United States are downloading personal software and apps onto corporate-owned tablets. These might be productivity-killing apps, cloud-storage apps or worse. But you knew that, right?

Millennials to IT: Who Cares?

Now for the kicker: The security problem is only going to get worse as millennials flood the workplace. That’s because millennials, especially on the younger side of the generation, don’t really care about security or the stress it causes the IT department; they just want BYOD without restrictions.

The survey calls 18- to 24-year-olds the “gourmet chefs of security breach,” because they play loose with corporate documents. That’s not good, given that millennials will make up the majority of your workforce by 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still having trouble seeing the big picture? Here’s the visual:

Tom Kaneshige covers Apple, BYOD and Consumerization of IT for CIO.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn. Email Tom at tkaneshige@cio.com