Ride the Lightning

Generation Y Users Treat BYOD Rules With Contempt

November 4, 2013

Dark Reading reported recently on a fascinating study by Fortinet showing that Gen Y employees are so dependent on their mobile devices that they are prepared to break any policy that restricts their use. In a survey of 3,200 employees from Generation Y (ages 21 to 32), researchers found that 51 percent were prepared to contravene any policy banning the use of personal devices at work or for work purposes.

This attitude is spreading to other technologies: Thirty-six percent of respondents using their own personal cloud storage accounts (e.g., Dropbox) for work purposes said they would break any rules brought in to stop them. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents have a personal account for at least one cloud storage service, with Dropbox accounting for 38 percent of the total sample. Seventy percent of personal account holders have used their accounts for work purposes.

Twelve percent of this group admits to storing work passwords using these accounts and 16 percent have stored financial information. Twenty-two percent of the respondents have stored critical private documents, such as contracts/business plans in their cloud accounts, while one-third (33 percent) have stored customer data.

I have never understood the arrogance of this attitude or the failure to appreciate that employers have a duty to impose rules in order to protect client/customer/proprietary data. It might be one thing if they felt secure themselves . . . but when asked if their personal devices had ever been compromised, over 55 percent of respondents indicated that they had experienced an attack on personally owned PCs or laptops. About half of these respondents said the compromise had an impact on their productivity and/or they had experienced a loss of personal and/or corporate data.

Even more alarming, fourteen percent of respondents said they would not tell an employer if a personal device they used for work purposes became compromised.

It is common for each succeeding generation to despair of the generation that follows it, but I confess to a certain amount of despair for a generation that is so tied to their mobile devices that they cannot balance their desire to use their devices with the duty owed to the employer to keep work data secure. In a world where young folks cannot seem to keep from checking their phones at weddings and funerals, I guess it is no wonder that they see nothing wrong with willfully disobeying rules imposed at work.

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