Tom Kaneshige

Some employees thought they were pretty sneaky downloading confidential data from corporate computers to thumb drives days before they turned in their resignations and bolted to a competitor.

More often than not, they didn't get away with it. Armed with forensic computer analysis--namely, the USB port registry--managers confronted these employees during the exit interview.

Think mobile app, and what do you see?

Executives tapping native apps bursting with functionality on iPhones and Android smartphones. Field salespeople showing off beautifully rendered iPad PowerPoint or Pages slides to impressed customers. Pretty heady stuff for some companies.

When the district sales managers of a luxury retailer logged into their corporate email accounts on shiny, new iPads for the first time, at the same time-cheers went up.

But something else went down: the Lotus Notes server.

When venturing into new terrain, Boy Scouts pride themselves on being prepared for all sorts of dangers. For Clint Andrea, IT director for the Northern Star Council Boy Scouts of America in Minnesota, new terrain comes in the form of bring-your-own-device iPads, along with the danger of data loss.

"With more managers working from out of the office than ever before, it's important we provide remote employees with instant access to the network without compromising on security," Andrea says.

In the mid-1990s, I ran across what looked like an incredible story: A teenager, dubbed the Whiz Kid, was selling a ton of computers from his parents' home. Newspapers told the story complete with images of the teenager talking on his cell phone-which, at the time, was a big deal.

So I called the teenager and spoke to him and his dad. Turns out, his dad had set up a business to buy computers via a distributor and sell them directly to companies at cost. That's right, no margin. The dad and his son moved lots of computers because they were undercutting everyone's price.

Three IT workers with iPads gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room in Boston to figure out how to improve a long-standing technical service- and running into more questions than answers.

It would have been the beginning of an arduous process that included drafting inadequate original business requirements and technical design documents, circulating them to employees inside the operations groups around the world for comment and review, making revisions, and re-circulating improved documents.

It's the battle hymn of the mobile worker: They want to use their personal iPhones, iPads and Android devices instead of company-issued BlackBerry smartphones and PlayBooks to get their jobs done. It's part of a growing trend called BYOD, or bring-your-own-device.

While CIOs might gloat at BYOD's perceived cost savings--no more BlackBerry purchases!--they'd be wrong to do so. Aberdeen Group found that a company with 1,000 mobile devices spends an extra $170,000 per year, on average, when they use a BYOD approach.

Dubbed the new iPad, Apple's third-generation iPad hit the streets last week, igniting long lines at Apple stores and racking up huge sales. A few days later, though, after the dust settled critics began weighing in.

First, the good news in Cupertino: Apple claims new iPad sales topped three million units on opening weekend -- a new iPad sales record -- and this doesn't include marked-down iPad 2 sales. UBS analyst Maynard Um predicts 12 million new iPad sales this quarter, if supply can keep up with demand.

Six months ago, the first iPad landed at the Bank of the Ozarks. Now there are nearly 20 company-owned iPads in employees' hands, with plenty more on the way.

If Bank of the Ozarks, a 100-year-old community bank headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, decides to follow through on a bring-your-own-device program that will let personal iPads hook into the corporate network, the iPad floodgates will break wide open.

Social tools debuting at the enterprise level face many pitfalls that can derail even the best laid plans. A few IT leaders speaking at the Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise Conference and Expo in San Francisco last week revealed some of these social danger zones.

Social collaboration tools from enterprise vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Salesforce can help co-workers find each other over a vast expanse of departments and buildings to work on a project. Co-workers can communicate through text, pictures, audio and video. Employee blogs and wikis form a knowledge base that lets employees find answers to questions in mere minutes.