Gartner: Employees can use personal notebooks at work

There's a major shift coming at many companies. Some employers are letting their employees bring their private computers--including notebooks--to the workplace. Some experts may say this is a lax policy because privately-owned hardware could open the door for a hacker.

But Gartner's recent survey of 500 IT managers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany are finding that privately-owned notebook computers are gaining in popularity at the office, regardless of the security risk associated with using them.

The reason, of course, is cost. Employees bring their own hardware to work, and the employer doesn't pay for it or maintain it. Employees like it because their own notebooks are usually more powerful than the company-owned version.

The Gartner report found that 10 percent of the notebooks used at respondents' organizations were employee-owned. Not only that, IT managers said they expect the percentage to grow even higher next year. The survey also found that 47 percent of workplaces have banned employee-owned PCs and 43 percent have policies that allow the use of employee-owned PCs for work-related purposes.

We suspect if you really analyze a breach, you may find too many personal computers on a network. And we urge employers to be cautious with such policies.

For more on personal notebooks at work:
- see this CIO.com article

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