A recent report by Azzurri Communications (News - Alert) found that Choose Your own Device (CYOD) programs were twice as popular as bring your own device (BYOD) programs in the U.K. The combination of control and flexibility make the approach more appealing to companies there.

For the purposes of the survey, 251 individuals from 224 organizations participated. Of that total, 165 were considered employees. No organization in the survey was excluded based on the size of its workforce. The report sought the opinions of IT decision makers. About 97 percent surveyed were IT directors or managers. Getting as much feedback from decision makers as possible was critical to the report’s reliability.

Three categories of device policy were measured and defined as follows:

Don’t Bring Your Own Device (DBYOD) refers to organizational policies where the company owns the devices and determines which device an employee will use.

Bring Your Own Device is a policy where employees own the devices and can connect them to a company’s network.

Choose Your Own Device is a policy where the company owns the devices but lets employees choose which one they want to use.

The report found that in spite of the attention that BYOD has received recently, non-BYOD programs are more popular. Almost 60 percent of those surveyed stated that CYOD programs were the best fit for their company. Over one-fourth said that DBYOD was best, while the remainder (about one-eighth) said that BYOD was the best policy.

BYOD has a token amount of support in 58 percent of organizations. The report defines ‘token’ as any organization where fewer than 10 percent of employees can participate in the policy.

In organizations where the policy is considered company-wide, only 17 percent use BYOD. Company-wide is defined by the report as any organization where at least 75 percent of employees participate in the policy.

Almost one-third (31 percent) of organizations used CYOD on a company-wide basis.

What Azzurri has found, in a nutshell, is that BYOD, while often hyped, is not as common a policy as previously thought. U.K.–based companies are more likely to prefer CYOD and subject the vast majority of their employees to it.

A quote from the report aptly states what appears to be the feeling of many IT managers in the U.K. and why non-BYOD policies are more popular there: “There is no way for IT to assume full responsibility of securing and managing devices without ownership.”