Protecting company property in the age of BYOD has become the top priority for companies in every industry, since it brings a number of security and manageability concerns. When mobile devices don’t belong to the company, employees may use them for whatever they want.

CIOs are forced to face the reality since, according to a recent survey from Centrify, as many as 15 percent of employees believe that they have minimal, or no, impact on protecting corporate data stored on their personal devices.

The results of a survey conducted by Centrify on more than 500 employees, clearly show that almost a half of the respondents have more than six third-party apps on their BYOD products and nearly a quarter of them have had their personal account or password compromised.

What is even more frightening is the fact that 43% of employees have accessed the company information while using unsecure, public network, thus leaving corporate data exposed.

What can be done about it? The easiest solution would seem to educate employees on the dangers of BYOD and on solutions that help to safeguard the devices and applications. However, this has never been a successful approach. Most employees will just riffle through the regulations without giving it much thought, since company security practices are on the bottom of their list. Therefore, it is no surprise that some companies have gotten tough. The practices used to prompt employees to take more proactive measures range from periodical reviews to, even, termination.

However, since termination sounds a little too extreme a measure, a bad performance review seems to be a more appropriate one.

The truth of the matter is, the BYOD is simply too new of a technology trend, to expect the companies and CIOs to have all the right answers on how to proceed when company data is put at risk. As BYOD matures, everyone will become more aware of improving the security and minimizing the risk, while following the rules.