If anything, BYOD means that IT departments should be more vigilant than ever in making sure their security policies are up to date and can handle tens of even hundreds of devices out in the wild beyond the confines of the corporate network.

A good place to start for making sure that BYO devices are secure, Gartner US research director, Lawrence Orans, argues, is to take a three-pronged approach which breaks security down into three layers: the device, the data and protecting the network.

On the device side, Orans warns that some devices may be inherently more secure than others, and as a result, to tailor BYOD policies which recognise this.

"The company may have a policy where you can bring in some brands of personal devices but not others," he says. "For example, some organisations allow iPhones and iPads but not devices that run on the Android operating system because of Android's open development platform which makes the phone more vulnerable to attacks.""

Orans adds that enterprises should use the network as their security gatekeeper to make sure that employees are playing by the rules.