In the poll of American business users, 86% of respondents said that they have used either a web-based application or personal mobile device that was not sanctioned by the IT department. In fact, 31% of respondents said they had installed the application or device without any involvement from IT.

Only 13% of respondents said that their IT departments had complete control over the desktop. This is especially low, since 35% said that their companies had a policy forbidding the use of any consumer technology.

Interestingly, 53.6% of respondents believed they would be more productive at work if their employers allowed them to use the applications they have at home.

Joshua Holbrook, program manager at Yankee Group, believes this effect is in part a result of the structure of the technology industry. While corporate software is built by slow, lumbering giants that have to ensure its core code base fits all customers, web applications can be developed by small teams, and target niche markets and need not be final, polished versions on release. The latter is arguably the more efficient mechanism for the evolution of software, he argues, and more likely to produce popular applications.

“[Enterprise software vendors] have to have a learn-and-launch approach to new technology, whereas a lot of consumer application providers have a launch-and-learn approach,” explains Holbrook. “They put it out there and see how it goes. Google adopted that mantra wholeheartedly."

However, the adoption of consumer technology in the work place poses a significant security threat. Unsecured mobile devices and memory cards are a potential weak point in any firewall. And at this years’ Black Hat IT security conference in Las Vegas, experts identified the new generation of web applications built using the AJAX programming paradigm as particularly susceptible to exploitation.

Office 2.0 - cloud computing approaches the enterprise
Lost property - mobile device security pitfalls