For the last couple of years, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was the problematic new kid on the block. Companies worriedly weighed the costs and benefits of allowing employees to use their own devices in the workplace. IT departments prepared for the torrent of new end points that would soon flood the corporate network in an effort to accommodate employees' personally owned and questionably secured phones, tablets and laptops. Despite concerns over BYOD's arrival, it has won over the risk-averse organizations, with 74 percent of organizations using or planning to allow BYOD, according to a recent study by Tech Pro Research.

For most organizations, BYOD has graduated, leaving its unruly past behind to become a manageable and contributing member of the corporate technology family. However, BYOD's sibling—Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)—has arrived on the scene, hoping for its own chance at access to the corporate world and bringing with it new and unique challenges.

BYOC is an extension of the motivation that drove the BYOD movement—employees want physical and virtual mobility to accompany the way they work. BYOC is defined as departments, workgroups, or employees owning and controlling public or third-party cloud services for storing information. The appeal of utilizing cloud services is obvious: They're fast, easy to use, and low-cost or free for limited (but quite functional) capacities. The need to access information from different devices, in different locations, gives personal cloud services a leg up on in-house IT storage systems, which frequently lack the ease of access and user-friendly features that third-party services offer.