Nine Consumer Technologies CIOs Fear: What Do You Think?

Even if most CIOs and IT managers were to acknowledge that major technology innovations occur in the consumer space first before they carry over into the enterprise, that doesn’t mean they have to like it. It also doesn’t mean the explosion of devices, smart phones, Web-based applications and social networks doesn’t keep them up at night worrying about enterprise security.

In the Nine Consumer Technologies CIOs Fear, we profiled which technologies IT executives find the most troublesome from a security perspective. Try as we may, however, we realize there might be some consumer technologies (which pose threats) that we missed, and we’d welcome your additions in the comment field below.

In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with a technology policy question regarding consumer technologies in the enterprise. We asked respondents of our consumer technology survey what they do after discovering consumer technologies in the enterprise, and the answers were as follows:

• 35 percent shut it down as soon as they detect it.
• 36 percent monitor the activity for risk
• 29 percent study the business case for mainstreaming the technology

Which of the three categories do you feel is the most warranted response? More than third take the harsh measure of shutting it down, but does that dismiss the productivity gains that can result from the use of consumer technologies?