• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 19, 2014

Another day, another Google acquisition -- seriously. Google announced that it will acquire device management company Divide, which helps enterprise customers manage and secure employee devices while ensuring that employees have the best tools and experiences to remain productive on their personal devices at work.

The buzzwords -- bring-your-own-devices -- to work emerged years ago as mobile use became more popular. The biggest problem with the trend is in securing and protecting company assets against hackers and data thieves, especially when employees have access to a company network and trade secrets. The research company Gartner forecasts that supporting BYOD will cost enterprises $300 per employee annually by 2016.

Gartner estimates that by 2017 half of companies both large and small will require employees to BYOD, including PCs, smartphones and tablets. Gartner defines a BYOD strategy as an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and other users to use a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data.

The co-founders behind Divide worked at Morgan Stanley, along with some of the executives. Others came from IBM and McAfee.

"Businessman on a Smartphone" photo from Shutterstock.