Bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon is a gaining indisputable momentum in the business world. This growing trend is enabling employees make use of their personal devices to execute work. It facilitates them with substantial benefits in terms of improved work productivity and efficiency and seamless collaboration. Moreover, as an employee of any enterprise, they can easily access company's information anytime and from anywhere. All they need to have is connection to the Internet.

Best part is that with improved productivity and streamlined collaboration, the employees of any organization can get connected with team members or co-workers in different time zones at convenient times.

According to Gartner, it is projected that by 2016, near about 40% of enterprise organizations are expected to discontinue providing devices to their employees. BYOD strategies are the most far-reaching transition to the complete economics and the ethos of customer computing in industry in decades. 

In fact, five years ago, this would have been quite challenging; employer used to provide BlackBerrys phones that certainly subjugated the business landscape. They were some preferred devices that were provided to the IT departments ubiquitously. Thanks to the emergence of secure transport infrastructure. Every message sent from the phone was transmitted through Research In Motion Limited (RIM) Network Operations Center, thereby offering unmatched and highly secured encryption relatively to early smartphone options, such as Android and IPhones.  

With the advent in technology, smartphone usage has burgeoned, and both IPhones and Android-phone manufacturers introduced superior levels of encryption to thwart phones from being hacked. In fact, much of the BYOD drive has been ascribed to prominent fall in Blackberry phones and mounting use of smartphones among the users worldwide. Apart from this, a highly significant emergence that pushed the BYOD movement to a next level is cloud computing. 

Undoubtedly, the ever-evolving security of cloud storage provisions has empowered enterprises to let their employees' access highly confidential data from almost any location and through any device.

The cloud forms a robust framework which lets BYOD function seamlessly. Plus, it liftoff the burden from IT departments. It can look for suitable devices for their employees, and manage and maintain the latest software and hardware upgrades, while providing secured and manageable storage space for critical information that is not stored on any specific device, but simply accessible from it.

In a nutshell, looking at the current market scenario I would say that BYOD is here to stay and now it is the on us of enterprises to accommodate according to emerging market. Hence, redefine your present hardware security policies simply by embracing BYOD with open arms and leverage the latest cloud-based services to manage your business-critical data.