The IT landscape is seeing a revolution of sorts. When you think this was it, a new technology comes up and creates a storm. The forces of cloud, mobility, social media and Big Data are together reshaping the IT environment. Out of these revolutionary changes, another trend called consumerization has found its way, leaving IT heads startled.

Today employees want to stay connected all the time, and use devices that were unheard of until few years back. Well is that bad? Its not till the time these devices find there way into the workplace and make it tough for the IT departments to ensure the right kind of security and support.
What is driving it? Some organizations may not be able to offer the kind of mobility or speed that employees are looking for or maybe people are just becoming more comfortable using their own devices. Reasons can be any. But the fact is that it is a wake up call for the CIOs. How will they deal with this change is the question.

Some reports and expert views suggest that it is going to have a strong impact on other areas as well. For instance, CSC Cloud Usage Index, suggests that consumerization is driving cloud usage. Of the more than 3500 respondents surveyed, 33 percent said that they have moved to cloud to support multiple devices being used at workplaces. When employees start using multiple devices, the IT departments are faced with the challenge to offer data and services on multiple platforms. This is a huge task that can be taken care of by cloud service providers.

Interestingly some experts also have a different take on this. Some say that for most organizations its more of a hype than a reality. Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive Vice President, Global Delivery, Emphasis, said, “We don't see too many large enterprises accepting this.” Large organizations have stringent security concerns and huge amount of data to deal with. This is a risk that most of the enterprises think may not be worth taking at the moment.

Gerry Clark, Partner, IGS, said at Nasscom, “Some organizations are embracing the change and some are resisting it. It will be interesting to see how the relationships between the enterprises, employees and customers evolve.” Its too early to say what route its going to say but there is definitely a change happening.