Mobility is an increasingly important part of today’s workforce, spurring the rise of the borderless office and flexible working environments. It’s also spurring the bring-your-own device phenomenon and creating headaches for office networking, as organizations try to support flexibility while preserving control over employees, corporate policy enforcement and security.

The continued growth of mobile devices and employees accessing corporate resources across different mobile networks and locations makes the session border controller (SBC) an increasingly critical part of the enterprise’s infrastructure. And thanks to the proliferation of ever more connected devices, and escalating dependency on smartphones as our mobile office spaces, that’s a trend that’s unlikely to change—ever.

Consider the latest Gallup poll, showing that smartphones are our near-constant companions: A full 81 percent of smartphone users say they keep their phone near them "almost all the time during waking hours." Americans' attachment to their smartphones is so strong that 63 percent report keeping it near them at night even while sleeping.

Naturally, that leads to frequent use. About half of U.S. smartphone owners (41 percent) check their devices several times an hour. In many cases, they check it even more frequently: 11 percent say they check it every few minutes.

One-fifth (20 percent) of Americans claim to check their phones about once an hour, leaving just 28 percent who check them less frequently. But most say their phones are checked as the last thing before going to sleep and first thing upon waking.

Smartphone attachment is also something that tends to increase in the younger demographics. The survey found that more than seven in 10 young smartphone owners check their device a few times an hour or more often, including 22 percent who admit to checking it every few minutes. That contrasts with the 21 percent of smartphone owners who are aged 65 and older who check it a few times an hour or more, with a miniscule 3 percent of that older age group checking it every few minutes.

This is of particular importance considering that by 2020, the 80 million millennials (ages 18-31) in the U.S. are estimated to make up 50 percent of the employee population. The use of mobility as an enabling reality for business functions of all kinds—be it checking email or downloading critical files with sensitive company information—will only grow in importance as this group takes its place in the workforce.

SBCs will therefore continue to be critical to support this reality in a responsible way. They will be used for NAT traversal, for extending authentication and IT security policies to remote workers, for smoothing provisioning of corporate SaaS (News - Alert) apps and more.

“All of the consequences of this brave new world in which individuals essentially stay in constant touch with the world through their handheld devices are certainly not known at this point, but are being studied with increasing frequency,” Gallup noted in the study. “Certainly, the telephone and then radio and then television changed the way people relate to the world, and the smartphone, no doubt, is doing the same.”