By 2017, half of workers will bring their computers to work

More and more companies are encouraging their workers to work on their own devices, thereby reducing costs for computing equipment, but at the same time increasing costs for maintaining licenses and security

T-portal writes that 'BYOD' or 'bring your own device' is a practice that is spreading more and more in the corporate world.

According to research by the American company Gartner, by 2017 half of the world's companies will ask their employees to provide their own devices for work. It is estimated that about 15 percent of companies, due to the nature of their work, will never switch to such a business philosophy, while about 40 percent of them will offer employees to choose the model themselves.

Behind those numbers is actually an economic calculation: according to Gartner's calculations, securing equipment for work, such as computers, mobile phones or tablets, amounts to about 600 dollars per worker per year. For large companies with more than 2.500 employees, this can represent a significant annual cost.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that these are the companies that most encourage their employees to bring personal devices to work. Currently, BYOD is mostly used in India, China and Brazil, and European companies do not show much interest in it for now.

Although such a business philosophy gives employees the opportunity to choose the devices they will work on, they still expect the employer to somehow compensate them for using their own resources. The more employees and their various devices, the higher the security costs. More different licenses and more potential problems due to different platforms that have to work together.

"We have finally gotten to the point where the IT industry officially recognizes that people use their official devices for non-official purposes as well. They also often use private devices for business purposes. Once you understand that, you will understand why it is necessary to protect data in a different way than it has worked so far," said David Willis, vice president and analyst at Gartner.