More than 80 percent of employed adults use a personally-owned device for work-related activities, according to a recent Harris Interactive survey, suggesting that the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is not coming, it's already here.

The survey, conducted on behalf of security software firm ESET (News - Alert), also found that nearly 47 percent of employed adults use their personal desktops to access or store company information. The number drops to 41 percent for personal laptops and 24 percent for smartphones. Users seem to be more judicious with their personal tablets, with just 10 percent of respondents accessing or storing company information on their slate.

The scarier news for IT administrators may be the security statistics. Harris found that less than half of all BYOD gadgets are protected by even the most rudimentary security measures.

Overall, only one-third of respondents indicated that company data is encrypted on their personal devices. Tablet owners are the worst violators, enabling auto-lock less than 10 percent of the time. Around 25 percent of smartphone users and one-third of laptop owners employ auto-lock technologies on their device.

"Auto-locking with password protection was enabled by less than half of laptop users, less than a third of smartphone users, and only one in ten tablet users," Cameron Camp, a security researcher with ESET, noted in a blog post explaining the results of the survey.

ESET suggests three quick and inexpensive steps that can be taken to increase BYOD security: turn on auto-locking, turn on password protection and enable encryption.

The survey validates the results of an earlier study conducted by Trend Micro (News - Alert), which found that 78 percent of companies allow their employees to use personal devices for work-related functions. Nearly 50 percent of those companies reported a data breach that was related to an employee-owned device accessing the corporate network, says EWeek.

Interestingly, Apple's iOS platform was ranked as the most secure mobile operating system, followed by BlackBerry, Android (News - Alert), Symbian and Windows.