"Whether the majority of devices expected in the business are personally owned or corporately owned, tweaks to policy and infrastructure are a must," he says.
He adds that IT infrastructure is already overloaded more than ever before, and if the right policies, technologies and monitoring tools are not put in place, businesses face poor network performance, low availability and the threat of security and compliance issues.
"A large number of wearable devices joining a corporate network are likely to cause a drain on wireless bandwidth which can slow application performance. If you have a scenario where a large number of new wearables join a network, each device will want its own slice of the corporate Wi-Fi network. This situation will need to be closely monitored and managed," says Porro.
Raimund Genes, CTO of IT security company Trend Micro, says that any new device that enters the business environment presents a security risk, and it is inevitable that wearables will connect to corporate data, just like other smart devices.
"It is crucial that organisations think about the measures they can take to minimise the threat from wearables, before they become as omnipresent as smartphones," he observes.
He says organisations need to be receptive to wearables in the workplace, as saying no often drives employees from Shadow IT to Rogue IT. "What is required is a policy that outlines how various devices can be used. For example, how to connect to the PC and other corporate devices, what network (if any) they can connect to, whether they can view corporate data, and so forth," he adds.
What next for wearables?
The coming years and certainly over the next eighteen months will mark the cornerstone for new guidelines and regulations for wearable tech in the workplace, according to Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender.
"Undoubtedly, wearables will continue to leak into the corporate world at an even faster pace and companies will have to find new ways of regulating them as they go along," he says.
But Nigel Beighton, vice president of Technology at Rackspace says that we are still just at the beginning as far as wearables are concerned.
"We are at the start of the journey, and although more and more devices will hit the market, we will need to see improvements in battery and sensor technology before we can grasp the real benefits of wearables. It will be the second or third generations that will show us this, so tangible change will happen in about five years. Now is the time to play and learn, not to mass adopt," he says.
