Mobility and Security in the New Way of Working: Employee Satisfaction in a Choose Your Own Device(CYOD) Environment

The consumerization of IT, known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), is an inevitable component in the future IT infrastructure of organizations. It is not the question if employees will use consumer IT products for their work, but how and under which conditions. The use of personalized mobile devices may be beneficial for both the employee and organization, but the concern of IT executives, on corporate data residing on uncontrolled mobile devices, is often leading to a restrictive policy. Giving employees the ability to choose from a variety of secure devices, at the expense of the organization, Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), may well bring the best of two worlds. In this research 126 employees at four multinational organizations were surveyed on their perception of usability and satisfaction of devices for their knowledge tasks. The outcomes were matched against a Risk Assessment on seven identified IT threats. The results show that a majority (52%) believes their performance would improve, when given the ability to choose a device of their own. The Risk Assessment shows that IT security risks do not need to increase, provided that the proper security policies are in place. This implies that the performance and satisfaction of employee can improve in a secure CYOD environment.