The holidays are here and before you can say "Happy New Year," it’ll be 2013 and you’ll be back in your office trying to map out the path to a successful 2013. Before that happens, we’d suggest that you sit back with a cup of holiday cheer of your choosing, throw a log on the fire and settle in to review the lessons that we all learned in 2012 – which should help when the calendar changes in a few short weeks.

This month’s post was co-written with Tyler Lessard, the CMO of Fixmo, a mobile risk management company that helps organizations identify, mitigate and manage the risks associated with mobile devices in the workplace.

It’s believed to be common knowledge that companies need to mobilize their workforces in order to increase productivity and allow employees to work from home as they need to, which also serves to give the company an advantage in recruiting and retaining talent.

We’ve talked a lot in this space about how to manage mobile expenses for your company in a way that ensures that employees are happy with the device and usage plans and that companies are happy by keeping the bottom line in check.  Everything seemed to be making sense for enterprise mobility—even the idea of BYOD was seeming less than frightening.

With the recent launch of "TheNew iPad", most of the fanfare and press thus far has been around new features, the 4G/LTE speed of the new device and its Retina Display screen.

Not a single analyst firm missed the opportunity to list Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) or the Consumerization of IT as one of their top predictions of 2012.  That said, most of the focus has been on how wonderful BYOD policies are, as hardware costs get shifted to employees and organizations need only provide a way to access data and applications. 

Early adopters of BYOD, however, tell a slightly different story: one of unexpected costs and the need to maintain a level of IT involvement. 

BYOD Brings Many Challenges