While the average company reported that less than 32 percent of its workforce is mobile, 97 percent of those companies have centralized IT departments managing their mobile solutions, according to the SAP benchmarking study.

The Benefits of BYOD

According to a recent Amdocs survey, 73 percent of service providers expect to see a 10-25 percent increase in BYOD device requests from business customers because they see the potential for cost savings, employee satisfaction and increased productivity. Almost half of service provider respondents say they believe that BYOD will decrease costs and increase productivity by 10 to 25 percent.

"The business segment represents huge revenue potential for service providers, and to capitalize on this market they will need to offer tailored and competitive offerings, including BYOD," said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing for Amdocs. "By converging BSS and OSS, service providers gain a unified customer view required to support BYOD requests, such as creating hybrid plans and offering device support, ultimately simplifying the customer experience."

According to a BT survey on the competitive advantages for enterprise BYOD adoption, IT managers within organizations with BYOD policies, providing the security infrastructure to support a BYOD policy has had the most impact on organizations in the U.S. This impact is where service providers can make the difference.

Policy

The Amdocs survey of service providers revealed 52 percent of business customers want the ability to disable business functions like email and IM when the device is in personal mode. Seventy percent are concerned with excess bandwidth use, which can potentially increase connectivity costs and networking issues. These challenges can be tackled with smart device-level policy and security. As more IP-based networks are deployed, a more sophisticated policy can be enabled to enforce across the entire network, rather than just at the entry point. Cisco's SecureX solution, for instance, can make real-time adjustments to access when an unauthorized device comes onto the network or tries to access secure data.

Chae-Gi Lee, research director at Gartner, identifies three specific challenges facing enterprise amidst the BYOD party: mobile data protection; network access control; and mobile device management. All three can be addressed by smart networks with stringent, device-level policy and security that knows exactly which devices are on the network, what data they are trying to access and when.