Along these lines, Virginia Bank is using IronKey Trusted Access to make sure remote access for BYOD employees is secure. Some 60 Virginia Bank employees remotely access the network, with the heaviest users being sales people on their own mobile devices and laptops (although no iPads yet).

By allowing BYOD, Virginia Bank is partially getting out of the hardware procurement business. "Instead of providing staff with laptops to work outside the office, they'll use Trusted Access with their own personal computers to use the bank's public and private cloud apps," says Sharon Moynihan, senior vice president of IT and project management at Virginia Commerce Bank.

Moynihan credits the cloud component of Trusted Access for delivering the cost savings. Minus the cost of the device itself and, more importantly, related network support, management and security software and services, Virginia Commerce Bank stands to save roughly $1,500 per device.

But cost savings can be tricky, another moving target in the BYOD space. For instance, if a CIO chooses to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) model to deliver apps and data securely on BYOD computers, then he is really just shuffling costs. Instead of spending money on endpoint hardware, the CIO is buying servers and network upgrades and hiring staff to maintain and monitor VDI.