You tell us: why do IT shops block employee Macs more than PCs?

Love them, hate them, or profit off them immensely, one thing is certainly true about employees: they’ll inevitably try to bring their own tech onto the corporate network. Our report last week about Forrester Research’s latest IT survey caused major controversy by suggesting that IT departments are less tolerant of employee-owned Macs than Windows PCs. We are going to revisit those numbers briefly, report back further information we’ve received from Forrester, and then we’re going to ask you how you’d account for this phenomenon. Is Apple to blame? Should IT shops wake up?

The survey data

To review: A Q3 2011 Forrester survey of 1,053 companies in North America and Europe with at least 20 employees found that 32 percent do not allow employee-owned Windows PCs access to any corporate resources—whether it be corporate applications, the internal network, or even just Web-based e-mail. In the same group of 1,053 companies, 42 percent block Macs. If you do the math, the group blocking Mac computers is 31 percent larger than the group blocking Windows.

Is this difference statistically significant? Yes, it is. The number of people surveyed is consistent between the two results (Forrester provided us with a set of numbers from a different population survey on Friday, although the data is essentially the same), and the questions were the same.

If you’re not yet convinced, a suitable test for this data set is Fisher’s Exact Test. The null hypothesis is that platform choice makes no difference to the granting of access. Our alternative hypothesis is that platform choice has some influence over the granting of access. The 2-tailed p-value from Fisher’s Exact Test is 0.00165. With a typical alpha (significance level) of 5 percent, or even 1 percent, we would therefore reject the null hypothesis, and accept the alternative hypothesis. That is, the granting of access isn’t independent of platform.

Within the enterprise subset of respondents, composed of 590 companies with at least 1,000 employees each, 33 percent block employee-owned Windows PCs and 41 percent block employee-owned Macs. In both data sets, the situation is similar. A large minority of companies do not want any employee-owned computers accessing corporate resources, but they’re more tolerant of Windows PCs rather than Macs. (Forrester tells us they didn’t ask the survey sample about Linux distributions.)

We’d like to know why you think the results show this disparity between platforms. IT organizations in government agencies, financial services firms, and the like have strict requirements that may exclude Macs—fairly or not. Aside from bizarre policies and requirements imposed outside of the organization, the question remains: why this difference? Is it a bigger risk to let Mac users onto the network than Windows users? Or is it just a bigger management headache, with Windows-focused IT shops not wanting the burden of managing two platforms?

Add in another wrinkle: similarly intriguing results emerged when Forrester polled companies regarding employee-owned smartphones and tablets. Within the enterprise subset, 30 percent have blocked all tablet access-a bit lower than the number blocking Windows computers, and much lower than those blocking Macs. When it comes to employee-owned smartphones, only 23 percent of enterprises block all access. One caveat there is that smartphone owners are still by and large directed toward Web-based e-mail, which tends to be clunky on a small screen. 65 percent of companies allow access to Web-based mail but only 36 percent grant access from a smartphone’s native e-mail app.

Within the PC and Mac data cuts we also find that companies are less draconian when it comes to granting basic Web access. Within the full data set of 1,053 companies, 32 percent of businesses allow employee-owned Windows PCs internal network access and 60 percent allow Web-based e-mail access. Within that same survey group, 23 percent allow employee-owned Macs access to the internal network and 51 percent grant Macs the right to Web-based e-mail.