Inconsistent enforcement of BYOD security has resulted in many C-level executives presenting grave risks to their companies' record of secure data exchange, according to ZDNet contributor Spandas Lui. The unique risk posed by executive users was discovered and explained in a recent Australian research report, while analogous BYOD risks from other employees were discovered in a separate study from YouGov.

The first study, "2013 Data Protection Trends Research," stated that 57 percent of Australian companies did not have a BYOD policy yet , while 33 percent forbade BYOD devices from accessing data over corporate networks. Companies that had implemented BYOD policies nevertheless did not enforce them consistently for all their employees. Twenty-seven percent of them made BYOD policy exceptions for their C-level executives, opening the doors to data compliance issues and possible data leakage whose seriousness is magnified by the types of data to which these leaders typically have access.

"Often, the exceptions are made for C-level executives because they want to have certain availability and access to data," one of the report's coordinators told ZDNet. "But typically, you would imagine the C-levels will have the most critical data and giving them exceptions to BYOD policies are a security risk."

BYOD issues extend beyond the C-level
Non-executive employees are also exposing their companies to risks by not being attentive to BYOD-related security updates. The YouGov study stated that, over the past six months, 34 percent of employees either did not update their data security software or failed to install it.

These oversights may be the result of insufficient communication between IT departments and employees about the importance of BYOD security policies. Although one-fifth of surveyed employees admitted to having suffered a breach on their BYOD device, 50 percent of them nevertheless believed that data security software would make no difference in reducing their risk level.

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In her analysis of the study, Midsize Insider writer Marissa Tejada explained that IT departments must educate employees and make everyone a stakeholder in BYOD security success in order to harness the productivity potential of BYOD. She noted that three-fourths of employees use their own devices to do work and that many of them use more than one device. With the widespread appeal of BYOD, the onus is on companies to provide every employee with the proper security software backed up by a consistent enforcement policy.