14 DAY TRIAL // A new study performed by Vision Critical on behalf of Fortinet reveals that 51% of employees aged between 21 and 32 would contravene company policies that restrict the use of personal devices, personal cloud storage accounts, and wearable technologies in the workplace.
The figures show that 36% of the 3,200 Generation Y employees that took part in the study would break rules banning them from using their own cloud storage accounts, such as Dropbox, for work purposes.
When it comes to wearable technologies, such as Google Glass and smart watches, 48% would break the rules if asked not to use such devices for work.
16% of respondents believe such technologies will become widespread at work “immediately.” 33% believe they will be widely utilized for work purposes once they become more affordable. On the other hand, only 8% say such technologies will not become widespread.
As far as cloud storage services are concerned, almost all the respondents have an account, and 70% of those who do have admitted using it for work-related tasks. Worryingly, 12% use their personal cloud accounts to store work passwords, 16% for financial information, 33% for customer data, and 22% for critical corporate documents.
Over half of the workers who participated in the Fortinet study admitted suffering an attack on their personal laptops and PCs. Around half of these cases resulted in loss of personal and/or corporate data and/or had a negative impact on productivity.
Only 19% admitted suffering an attack against their smartphones and tablets. However, in both cases, a higher proportion resulted in significant impact.
14% of respondents would not tell their employer if they were to suffer a breach that resulted in corporate data being compromised. 52% don’t know much about APTs, DDOS attacks, botnets and pharming.
“This year’s research reveals the issues faced by organizations when attempting to enforce policies around BYOD, cloud application usage and soon the adoption of new connected technologies,” said John Maddison, vice president of marketing for Fortinet.
“The study highlights the greater challenge IT managers face when it comes to knowing where corporate data resides and how it is being accessed. There is now more than ever a requirement for security intelligence to be implemented at the network level in order to enable control of user activity based on devices, applications being used and locations,” he added.
“It’s worrying to see policy contravention so high and so sharply on the rise, as well as the high instances of Generation Y users being victims of cybercrime. On the positive side, however, 88% of the respondents accept that they have an obligation to understand the security risks posed by using their own devices.”