Cisco has 60,000 Internet-connected devices in its BYOD program at the end of 2012 and just under 14,000 were iPads, the company says in its 2013 Annual Security Report.
Apple’s iPads and iPhones have flooded in under Cisco’s BYOD program which the company’s executives have partially credited for killing Cius, the doomed enterprise Android tablet that Cisco pronounced dead late last May.
In 2012, Cisco added 11,000 smartphones and tablets companywide and has nearing an equal ratio of mobile devices to staff. Cisco had a headcount of roughly 70,000 in 2012.
“Mobile at Cisco is now BYO, period,” Brett Belding, a senior manager at Cisco IT Mobility Services says in report.
“At the end of 2012, there were nearly 60,000 smartphones and tablets in use in the organisation—including just under 14,000 iPads—and all of them were Bring Your Own (BYO).”
He added that the iPad was the fastest growing BYOD in the company’s program.
Cisco also allows Android as well as BlackBerry and Windows Phone. BlackBerry at Cisco has been on the wane since 2010 while Windows Phone remained stagnant. Though growing, Android remains in the shadow of the 28,600 iPhones at Cisco today -- a number which has tripled over two years.
Cisco execs have been giving regular updates about its BYOD program in recent times, no doubt because it sells UTM appliances, identity management and other services against the trend.
SAP/Sybase blogger Eric Lai, who has been tracking large iPad deployments, noted from a conference in early May last year that Cisco had 21,000 iPhones, 8,144 iPads and 2,000 Cius tablets (it killed the device later that month).
Cisco’s iPad count however is not quite as big as SAP’s. Outside a 5,000 device BYOD program, SAP offers staff a range of 10 smart devices and under that program manages 20,000 iPads, 20,000 iPhones, 4,000 Samsung Android devices, and a smaller number of BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.
Android malware
Cisco has gone against the grain in its Android malware warnings to enterprise customers. While it reports Android malware growth at 2,577 percent, it notes that mobile malware encounters are “only 0.5 percent of all web malware encounters” in 2012.
Although 95 per cent of mobile malware encounters were Android, enterprise should be more concerned by data loss, jailbreaking, and managing app installation channels.
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