By John Herrema, Good Technology

In today’s fast-paced world, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are essential in the enterprise. While some of these devices – laptops, Blackberrys, and even tablets – are provided by the company, many are not. The fastest growing mobile device categories, such as Android smartphones and tablets, iPhones, and iPads, are often purchased by employees at their own expense. These employees, who may own two or three mobile devices and insist on using them for work-related tasks, require attention from the IT department.

Organizations must accept this “bring your own device”, or BYOD, new reality and adopt policies and tools to allow employees to use a range of mobile devices securely within the organization. Fortunately, protecting data and networks while giving employees a choice of mobile tools to access Intranets, Web-enabled enterprise applications, collaboration tools, corporate instant messaging services, and to share documents, are not mutually exclusive objectives.

If you’re struggling to support the demand for user-owned devices while still protecting your network and data, you’re not alone. A study by Good Technology and independent research firm Vanson Bourne found that half of IT directors in large enterprises are being pressured to support personal devices at work, and 80% of IT departments routinely get requests to implement enterprise apps and emails on employees’ personal mobile devices. That said, only 10% of IT departments have comprehensive BYOD policies to fully support business use of personal mobile devices.

Even companies that do have BYOD policies are challenged when employees either unwittingly, or with the best of intentions, purposely disregard it. At one time or another, in the normal course of meeting their work objectives, most employees will forward work emails to a personal email account, or copy documents to an online repository. All too often, someone might accidentally leave a smartphone loaded with corporate data on a bus, airplane, or in a restaurant, or have an iPad stolen from a car.

And, of course, employees of companies without any BYOD policies in place are virtually guaranteed to use their mobile devices to access corporate apps and data anyway. This is especially true for enterprises that allow Web-based access to email (e.g., through Outlook Web Access or iNotes), or allow users to install third-party productivity applications such as Dropbox on company-owned laptops, desktops, or tablets.

How can IT departments meet the security challenges of this BYOD world? Once a company acknowledges and accepts that these new gadgets are already entering the workplace and almost certainly accessing its network and data, the first step is to proactively define a BYOD policy. If you don’t set a policy, then by default your employees are doing it for you.

IT departments can no longer afford to bury their heads in the sand, or take a hodgepodge, device-by-device approach to mobile data and application management. The benefits of a consistent and company-wide BYOD policy supported by tools and processes are clear:

• Higher productivity because employees use their mobile devices to work at all hours of the day;
• Increased employee satisfaction when employees are allowed to choose their own devices based on personal preferences, and;
• Potentially lower overall costs when employees buy their own mobile devices and pay for their own monthly service plans.