The Forrester report concurs that mobile professionals are good BYOD candidates and that 74% of them use laptops.

Johnson says businesses need to write formal BYOD policies that include legal documents in which users acknowledge restrictions to what they can do with their devices when connected to corporate networks and authorizing some corporate management of the devices, including the ability to wipe corporate data should they be lost or stolen.

IT departments need to control user access on these devices, ensure data encryption and restrict the ability to move data off them to other drives. Partitioning the hard drives of these devices may also be necessary to protect corporate data. "It depends on how much data is local," Johnson says.

(Tim Greene covers Microsoft for Network World and writes the Mostly Microsoft blog. Reach him at tgreene@nww.com and follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/Tim_Greene.)