We didn't find out about a white paper on Bring Your Own Device Security until after we had written our post about the new Sprint Device Management addition to the Professional Mobility Services portfolio, but it has some interesting data that complements what we had to say.

The white paper, available at Webtorials (registration is no longer required), is based on a survey of more than 500 IT professionals – 60 percent of whom represent enterprises. We would have loved to have had the results of this survey broken out by size of organization, so we could focus on the enterprise responses, but with that high a percentage of enterprise respondents, the results probably provide a reasonably good picture of the enterprise BYOD security landscape.

And what a dangerous landscape it is. Only nine percent – one out of 11 – respondents said they were completely aware of all the mobile devices accessing their infrastructure and applications. The bulk of respondents (73 percent) felt they had a pretty good idea, but the rest had only a vague idea, or no idea at all, about their BYOD environment.

For what it's worth, 61 percent of respondents say their company allows BYOD access to resources, with 37 percent saying no, and the rest unsure. Of course, there's a big difference between not being "allowed" to do something and actually not doing it. Call us suspicious, but we're not convinced that all the employees in that 37 percent group are really not accessing the resources that are ostensibly off-limits.

The survey also shows that policies regarding BYOD security are generally lacking, with well over half of respondents saying their companies either have no policy or have a "sort of" policy. Which in most cases isn't worth the paper it's not really written on anyway.

The white paper goes on to talk about the kinds of devices being supported, best practices for mobile security, management and what tools survey respondents are using, and more. You may want to give it a look.

What we came away with was validation for the need for a solution like the Sprint Professional Mobility Services suite. It targets the enterprise multi-carrier environment, addressing devices, telecom expense management, procurement and deployment, logistics, lifecycles, policy management, multi-carrier troubleshooting, and support. Based on what the survey found, there's a pretty sizable need out there for security and management when it comes to BYOD.