Bangalore: A recent survey that questioned thousands of young "20-something" workers about their opinion regarding bring our own device policies (BYOD) found that slightly more than half of the young employees view it as their "right" to use their own mobile devices at work, rather than BYOD being just a "privilege " reports Ellen Messmer of ComputerWorld.

The survey which was sponsored by Fortinet, decided to focus on college-educated employees between the ages of 20 and 29 on the question related to BYOD specifically since this age group people the younger segment who are the future of the workforce is digitally savvy, and their first phone may be a smartphone. The 3,872 young workers who were respondants in the BYOD survey said that they are already engaged in the practice of using personally owned mobile devices at work on routine basis. Moreover, 1 out of 3 in retaliation to the corporate policies said that they would gladly go against the organisation and break any anti-BYOD rules and "contravene a company's security policy that forbids them to use their personal devices at work or for work purposes."

A research firm named Vision Critical conducted the survey last month across 15 countries including, U.K., U.S., Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland, United Arab Emirates, India, South Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. One interesting fact that came out of the survey was that India was the country where the highest percentage of young workers, 66%, admitted they already have or would contravene policies banning BYOD device use. Furthermore, about 30% of all those surveyed indicated they'd disobey policy on "non-approved applications." Sixty-nine percent want a "Bring Your Own Application" environment where "users create and use their own custom applications at work" said the report.

Two-thirds of the respondents surveyed said that not the company, but they (employees) should be responsible for the security of devices used for work purposes.

"The survey clearly reveals the great challenge faced by organizations to reconcile security and BYOD," said Patrice Perche, international vice president of international sales and support for Fortinet. "While users want and expect to use their own devices for work, mostly for personal convenience, they do not want to hand over responsibility for security on their devices to the organization."