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Most IT Pros Not Prepared to Manage BYOD Trend, Survey Says

SolarWinds, a provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, released the results of a personal mobile device survey conducted in partnership with Network World.

SolarWinds and Network World surveyed 400 IT professionals about how they are dealing with the Bring Your Own (Mobile) Device trend. Respondents expressed security concerns and IT support challenges. They cited the potential for loss of confidential information; legal issues and regulatory compliance risks; the introduction of malware threats; and the management burden associated with supporting diverse types of devices.

“IT professionals know that the BYOD trend is coming – or has already arrived – and many don’t know how much support or oversight they should provide on personal mobile devices,” said Sanjay Castelino, vice president of product marketing, SolarWinds. “They are trying to build the boat while sailing it, and are learning every day what the implications of BYOD are to their corporate networks.”

With the increased use of mobile devices in the workplace, 44 percent of respondents said they’ve seen an increase in help desk requests, over 40 percent said they’ve experienced an increase in network traffic, and over 15 percent have experienced an increase in security issues.

Over 65 percent said they don’t have the necessary tools in place to manage non-company-issued mobile devices on the network. One respondent noted, “An increase in workload due to a more diverse hardware and software infrastructure,” and another said that the management overhead is so significant that “we needed to outsource mobile device management to keep up with the demand.”

When asked to rate their level of confidence that they know about all of the personal mobile devices with access to the corporate network, over 27 percent said they are not at all confident.

Depending on the company policy, specific devices may be prohibited, devices may have to be approved, or personal devices may be banned altogether.

“Respondents said they’re employing a wide range of vendor tools and security tactics in order to provide safe, productive mobile access to employees,” said Ann Bednarz, associate online news editor, Network World. “Usage policies vary, and many are a work in progress as business priorities shift and access technologies mature. Determining security policies that can be reasonably enforced on personal mobile devices is tricky.”

SolarWinds IT management portfolio includes network management products to help IT professionals manage personal devices on the corporate network. This includes Network Performance Monitor (NPM), NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) for traffic analysis, Log & Event Manager (LEM) for detection of security issues, and User Device Tracker (UDT) to track the location of users.

The company recently acquired Rove, a mobile IT management vendor, releasing SolarWinds Mobile Admin software.

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Most IT Pros Not Prepared to Manage BYOD Trend, Survey Says

SolarWinds, a provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, released the results of a personal mobile device survey conducted in partnership with Network World.

SolarWinds and Network World surveyed 400 IT professionals about how they are dealing with the Bring Your Own (Mobile) Device trend. Respondents expressed security concerns and IT support challenges. They cited the potential for loss of confidential information; legal issues and regulatory compliance risks; the introduction of malware threats; and the management burden associated with supporting diverse types of devices.

“IT professionals know that the BYOD trend is coming – or has already arrived – and many don’t know how much support or oversight they should provide on personal mobile devices,” said Sanjay Castelino, vice president of product marketing, SolarWinds. “They are trying to build the boat while sailing it, and are learning every day what the implications of BYOD are to their corporate networks.”

With the increased use of mobile devices in the workplace, 44 percent of respondents said they’ve seen an increase in help desk requests, over 40 percent said they’ve experienced an increase in network traffic, and over 15 percent have experienced an increase in security issues.

Over 65 percent said they don’t have the necessary tools in place to manage non-company-issued mobile devices on the network. One respondent noted, “An increase in workload due to a more diverse hardware and software infrastructure,” and another said that the management overhead is so significant that “we needed to outsource mobile device management to keep up with the demand.”

When asked to rate their level of confidence that they know about all of the personal mobile devices with access to the corporate network, over 27 percent said they are not at all confident.

Depending on the company policy, specific devices may be prohibited, devices may have to be approved, or personal devices may be banned altogether.

“Respondents said they’re employing a wide range of vendor tools and security tactics in order to provide safe, productive mobile access to employees,” said Ann Bednarz, associate online news editor, Network World. “Usage policies vary, and many are a work in progress as business priorities shift and access technologies mature. Determining security policies that can be reasonably enforced on personal mobile devices is tricky.”

SolarWinds IT management portfolio includes network management products to help IT professionals manage personal devices on the corporate network. This includes Network Performance Monitor (NPM), NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) for traffic analysis, Log & Event Manager (LEM) for detection of security issues, and User Device Tracker (UDT) to track the location of users.

The company recently acquired Rove, a mobile IT management vendor, releasing SolarWinds Mobile Admin software.

Hot Topic

The Latest

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...