Best Source for Business Apps? Your Employees
A new report reveals that 70% small and medium-sized businesses actively use employee-introduced applications.
Photo courtesy of Ian Lamont
If you use Yammer or LinkedIn to help with task management or hiring, chances are you weren't the one who discovered them, according to a new survey.
Using online responses from over 1,200 companies, the study revealed that 70% of small and medium-sized businesses actively use business apps that were introduced by employees.
Some apps were more likely to be introduced by employees than others, the survey found. Nearly 69% of social apps and 52% of cloud-storage apps, including Dropbox and Google Drive, made their way to the office via employees.
Workers were less inclined to introduce productivity apps such as Evernote and Google Drive (39%) and collaboration apps including Skype (44%) into their small business.
“As with the ‘bring-your-own-device’ trend before it, we’re seeing an increasing number of businesses embracing the rise of employee-introduced applications entering the workplace, in spite of the inherent security concerns,” LogMeIn senior vice president of products Andrew Burton said in a statement.
That’s not to say that SMBs aren’t worried about potential security breaches: 67% of SMB IT personnel polled said data security is a primary factor limiting adoption of employee-introduced apps while 77% said they were most concerned about security risks of cloud-based storage apps.
Still, concern doesn’t always translate into actual safety. According to a previous study by the National Cyber Security Alliance, 83% of small business owners lack an official security plan for cyber threats including viruses and spyware.
