Petroleum giant BP has revealed it has 20,000 devices being used by staff as part of a bring your own device (BYOD) programme, from a workforce of 87,000 employees, according to its chief information officer, Dana Deasy.

Deasy said the firm moved to embrace the BYOD culture once it saw the shift and recognised it had to react quickly: “It was a snowball coming at us. You can either embrace it or fight it to the bitter end. We decided to embrace it two years ago,” he said, speaking at the Cloud World Forum event attended by V3.

“Once we got to the point of embracing, we got fully engaged around the idea of how the company can allow its employees to manage their own personal devices.”

However, Deasy said that staff have to agree to certain provisions being put in place on their device before they can have access to the BP network.

“To put their devices on our network, they have to obey certain rules and have an agent on them to manage it,” he explained. “It creates two separate worlds, one for their corporate world and one for their personal world.”

Deasy also gave some more insight into the scale of IT use at the firm, explaining it has 17,000 internal servers in use, storing a whopping 57 petabytes of data. As well as this, there is an estate of 90,000 PCs in use at the firm.

The move to embrace BYOD echoes a similar policy being rolled out by rival petroleum company Shell, which revealed earlier this year that it planned to allow its entire 135,000-strong workforce to take advantage of a BYOD programme.