While the press has been full stories about the so called BYOD trend in companies apparently such set ups are thin on the ground. CompTIA's spring survey of 400 IT and business executives shows that, depending on the size of the company anywhere from 39 per cent to 51 per cent of respondents are not doing BYOD at all.

Seth Robinson, director of technology analysis at CompTIA insists that BYOD was popular, but there are still a lot of companies at least attempting to control all mobile device deployment and management.

"The number of companies not doing BYOD is a lot higher than you'd think given all the hype around the term."

He was not the only one to notice and the world on the street is that BYOD is that it is proving to be more a more difficult transition than people have predicted. 

BYOD was supposed to get IT out of the mobile device purchasing and deployment game and save companies money, but it is proving to be riddled with hidden costs, such as expense report processing, management (including MDM software), employees gaming expenses, zombie phones attacking the mobile budget, messy conversion of phone service liability, among other issues. It is looking like BYOD might be more expensive than providing corporate-owned devices.

BYOD was also supposed to make employees happier but then companies tried to drafting BYOD user policies chock full of legalese favouring a company's right to monitor, access, review and disclose company or other data on a mobile device. The CompTIA survey found that less than half of the companies that offer BYOD feel that it contributes to employees' productivity. Finally, BYOD was supposed to make life easier for IT, but when you start to consider security and compliance issues it turns out to be more of a nightmare.

And what happens to all that corporate data when an employee leaves the company and takes their phone or laptop with them?