Sick and tired of lugging around that boring old, work-issued laptop day after day? Well, if you are, don’t sweat it, for the chances are that you won’t be required to do so for much longer, not if Gartner’s latest prediction comes true anyhow. According to a new global survey of CIOs by the industry analysis firm, there’s just no stopping the rise in popularity of the bring your own device (BYOD) trend, with almost 80% of companies across the world set to endorse it within the next four years.

Even more surprising is that a huge number of employees won’t even get to have a say in the matter – by 2017, as many as 38% of all companies will stop providing work-issued devices altogether, instead making BYOD a mandatory practice. Meanwhile, another 40% of companies will give their employees a choice between BYOD and using company devices, with only 15% saying that they will never embrace the model.

“BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades,” writes David Willis, Vice President of Gartner.

“The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction and reducing or avoiding costs.”

Gartner officially defines BYOD as the practice of allowing employees to bring their own personal devices to use in the workplace, whether its for running enterprise applications or just for accessing company data. Such devices encompass tablets, smartphones, laptops and in some cases, even desktops.

It’s not difficult to see why BYOD has become so popular. For one thing the strategy serves to free up IT costs, and at the same time mobilizes workforces. What’s more, BYOD can often boost morale, freeing up employees who often feel ‘virtually chained” to the ageing, clunky old machines provided by their employers. What with smartphones and tablets being virtual fashion accessories in this day and age, it can be advantageous to make use of these existing resources.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of reason to be horrified by the prospect of BYOD, which can be an absolute nightmare for CIOs in two key areas – security and interoperability. Companies that do embrace BYOD will need to invest a significant amount of money to ensure that employee’s devices are secure before tapping into corporate networks. After all, such devices are far more likely to go missing, either left behind on the bus or the train or elsewhere, than a bulky old desktop that’s tied to the office. Therefore these devices need an enhanced level of security to protect whatever critical business documents an employee might have access to. Moreover, cybersecurity also becomes a much bigger concern with BYOD – at the end of the day, CIOs just don’t know what kinds of websites their employees might be accessing from home, and these activities could easily expose company infrastructure to all kinds of malicious viruses and malware.

As well as these security concerns, there’s the problem of interoperability, namely that not all devices are compatible with one another. To counter this, many companies have looked to outsource cloud services that can run on any device, with the added advantage being that this often cuts down on IT costs as well.

The bottom line is, BYOD might be cheaper and more beneficial in terms of mobility, but any company that embraces it wholeheartedly needs to be aware of the huge can of worms they could be opening. Enterprise IT teams have a big responsibility to ensure that employees can work securely and effectively without putting company data at risk, and the cost of doing so could easily offset any savings that the strategy makes.