Firms are increasingly allowing staff to use personal notebooks for work, opening up a can of worms when it comes to data and document management, says analyst Gartner.

The analyst questioned 530 IT managers in the UK, Germany and the US, at firms employing over 500, and found that over 40% of firms now have a policy in place regarding the use of employee-owned PCs.

Respondents said they expect the average number of workers using employee-owned notebooks as their primary work PC to increase from 10% in 2009 to 14% by mid-2010.

During the past two years, nine out of ten companies have addressed the issue of employee-owned devices. Nearly half (48%) prohibit their use outright, but many others (43%) have specific policies that allow their use. How comprehensive these policies are when it comes to security and data management is key though.

“While employee-owned notebook programmes started to appear a couple of years ago, the acceptance of such schemes by organisations varies greatly,” said Gartner analyst Annette Jump. However, in the current climate of cost containment, large businesses are exploring all possibilities offered by alternative client computing architectures and device solutions, and that includes employee-owned PCs,” she said.

The Gartner survey found that service companies, such as insurance and telecommunications companies, are more likely to allow employee-owned PCs than organisations in the manufacturing, wholesale or government sectors. There were also differences from a country point of view, with 60% of the German companies in the survey currently allowing the use of employee-owned PCs, versus only 30% of US and UK companies.

Gartner said firms should allow corporate virtual machines to run on staff personal notebooks. This would see the operating system being partitioned to manage work and personal data separately. Compared with less-managed deployment scenarios, said Gartner, a managed virtual machine on an employee-owned notebook offers total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of between 9% and 40% when compared with company provided notebooks.

Gartner maintains that most of the cost savings with employee-owned notebooks are in indirect management costs. The direct costs of a virtual machine on an employee-owned notebook are actually higher than for a company-provided notebook, but this is more than compensated for by greater worker satisfaction and potential increased productivity, said the analyst.