Symantec Corp. announced the results of its 2012 State of Mobility Survey, which revealed a global tipping point in mobility adoption.

The survey highlighted an uptake in mobile applications across organizations with 71 percent of enterprises at least discussing deploying custom mobile applications and one-third currently implementing or have already implemented custom mobile applications.

Despite this adoption, almost half (48 percent) of survey respondents mentioned that mobility is somewhat to extremely challenging and a further 41 percent of survey respondents identified mobile devices as one of their top three IT risks.

Yet in the face of these challenges, IT is striking a balance between mobile benefits and risks by transforming its approach to mobility to deliver improved business agility, increased productivity and workforce effectiveness.

“This cultural change from refusing mobile devices not long ago, to actively distributing and developing mobile applications, has introduced a new set of challenges and complexities for IT staff,” said CJ Desai, Sr. VP, Endpoint and Mobility Group, Symantec. "Encouragingly, from a security perspective, a majority of organizations are thinking beyond the simple case of lost or stolen mobile phones.”

The State of Mobility Survey reveals the challenges organizations are grappling with in accommodating the mobility tipping point and also identifies and quantifies mobility-associated risks as perceived by IT decision makers. In this survey, more than 6,000 organizations from 43 countries bring to light the change in the usage of mobile devices and mobile applications.

The significant adoption of mobile applications demonstrates remarkable confidence, by organizations, in the ability for mobility to deliver value. This confidence is further supported by a rare alignment between expectations and reality.

Generally, the gains expected from new technologies far exceed the reality upon implementation. However, for the smartphones and tablets currently in use, 70 percent of those surveyed expected to see increased employee productivity, yet 77 percent actually saw productivity gains after implementing. Furthermore, 59 percent of respondents are now relying on mobile devices for line-of-business applications, another sign that mobility has graduated to mainstream status.

As with the adoption of any new technology, mobility is challenging IT organizations. Almost half (48 percent) of respondents mentioned that mobility is somewhat to extremely challenging, while two thirds noted that reducing the cost and complexity is one of their top business objectives.

In Symantec’s view, this increased pain level indicates the transition from small pilots and tactical implementations − where policies are often bypassed and exceptions are made − to enterprise-wide deployments where policy standards across a larger scale introduce greater complexity. This also suggests that many implementations are not yet taking sufficient advantage of their existing enterprise systems and processes, which would alleviate much of the pain and cost that comes with larger scale and resource duplication.