News

June 07, 2013

UK SMEs lead the way in mobile working

Small businesses in the UK are ahead of their counterparts in Europe and the USA when it comes to allowing staff to bring their own devices to work.

A poll of more than 1,250 SME directors and senior managers conducted by YouGov for Citrix finds that 34% of UK SME decision-makers have policies and systems in place to manage the use of employee's own computers and other devices for business purposes. This compares to an average of 28% in Europe and the rest of the world, and only 19% in the United States.

The report shows that Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is firmly established in the UK, with 47% of UK respondents saying their employees are already using personal devices for work.

In addition, the use of smart phones for UK businesses has developed to such an extent that it has narrowly overtaken devices such as PCs and laptops as most useful tool. The survey finds that 55% of senior directors and managers say they rely on smart phones, compared to 54% who selected PCs and 52% laptops.

The survey also looked at changing working practices and found:

• 25% of UK SMEs said they are under more pressure to introduce or increase mobile, flexible working practices than they were five years ago. This figure is higher than two years ago (21%), but lower than the global average (34%).
• Globally, employees are most commonly cited as a source of pressure for change (29%), ahead of external drivers such as competitors (27%), regulation (14%) and the environment (8%).
• 64% of respondents who say staff are allowed to use their own devices are now achieving measurable productivity and efficiency gains as a result of adopting personal devices and consumer-focused tools in the workplace.

However, another new survey on BYOD and cloud computing – by SolarWinds – suggests that there is still some way to go in the UK, with almost half of (47%) UK SMEs not having a BYOD policy.

Of those businesses yet to adopt BYOD, 58% said that it was not necessary for their business and 42% considered it a security risk. In addition, over a third of UK-based SMEs have no plans to adopt a cloud policy and 39% of UK IT decision makers said that they do not trust cloud solutions.