"We do this in our personal lives all the time," said Ron Ross, a fellow and senior computer scientist at NIST. "I have stuff in a safe deposit box. I can't fit everything at home in that safe deposit box, but I go through and take my very critical stuff" out of the house, whose locked doors won't stop all intrusions.

Mobile phone usage in developing countries can help combat poverty by giving the residents a way to send and transfer money, as well as receive information that could grow business, said panelists at a May 16 Brookings Institute event. For farmers in Africa, mobile capability means they can find out how much crops are selling for in other parts of the world and get a better price for their own product, Tufts University Economics Professor Jenny Aker said.

The strategy initially called for a governmentwide bring-your-own-device policy within 3 months, which ended up becoming a 43-page BYOD toolkit (.pdf) published Aug. 23, 2012. "It became quickly apparent that getting out an actual policy that applied across the diversity of agencies in that time frame was not something that was realistic and achievable," said Rick Holgate, chief information officer of the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Bureau.

The task of pulling together a complete, standardized inventory of all of its data is an enormous task for agencies—one Martin admits could be an overwhelming challenge.

The issue of reimbursement has been difficult for agencies to navigate as they experiment with bring your own device as an alternative to their traditional, government-provisioned mobile device strategies. It's clear that employees would pay for their own device but responisbility for talk and data plan costs are less well defined, said Kim Hancher, chief information officer at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.