A new report into mobile data usage on employee’s work phones shows an increased blurring of work and home when it comes to how staff are using their corporate devices. Published by Wandera, the mobile data gateway, the Wandera Enterprise Mobile Data Report Q1 2014 reveals:

• Email remains king – it is used more than any other app for 68 minutes a day
• Facebook is used on five times more corporate devices than LinkedIn
• 1% of corporate phones are being used for speed dating app Tinder
• Dropbox 13 times more popular than business specialist Box

The only report of its kind, the quarterly figures analyse mobile traffic usage across the Wandera network in the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. Wandera’s mobile data gateway sits between employee’s devices and the internet, allowing companies to manage how staff are using mobile data.

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Eldar Tuvey, CEO of Wandera said: ‘We’ve seen an explosion of mobile data usage over the last few years thanks to the rise of smartphones, 4G and video. For businesses this new kind of working brings many benefits – with people able to be contacted whenever or wherever they are, but it is important to understand data usage both in terms of costs, and the efficiencies of staff.

‘Our data is definitely showing a blurring of work and home tasks being done on these devices. With email so accessible, employees are using it more frequently out of office hours, with nearly a quarter of mobile data used between 6pm and midnight. The boundaries between work and home are being crossed and equally employees expect to use their work devices for personal use like Facebook or even dating.’

Email uses more mobile data than anything else, accounting for nearly a quarter (23%) of all mobile data usage. Employees spend on average 68 minutes per day on email on their work phones – six times more than any other app.

Social networks account for 10% of data usage on corporate devices. LinkedIn is used on only 16% of work devices, whereas Facebook is on 81% of corporate mobile phones, and Twitter on 65%.

Despite LinkedIn’s positioning as the professional network, it seems that users are still learning towards personal networks on their corporate devices. The lines are blurred even more with data revealing that 1% of corporate devices use the speed dating network Tinder.

Cloud storage is on the rise, and the usage pattern reflects the consumerisation of IT and crossover between business and consumer usage. Dropbox is used on 13% of devices, compared to business cloud specialist Box being used on just 1%.