Why are some in IT so resistant to change?

Maybe change is not seen as the positive that the author sees because of the increasing rate of change and declining ability of the IT staff to deal with change due to what someone in management saw as "workforce rightsizing". It'll be the IT staff that takes the brunt of management's wrath when corporate data leaks out and the company finds itself in a PR disaster, sued by customers, and/or penalized by Wall Street. The business people who want to use their new, unsecured toys in a corporate environment are never going to see any of that kind of pain. Back in the day, you used corporate-owned equipment on the corporate-owned network to access corporate-owned data and you didn't hear as much about massive security problems. Those problems still probably existed, though at nowhere near the scale or frequency we see today, but they were more likely to be insider shenanigans. Now all it could take is someone with a personal smart phone running a buggy user-installed application that could wind up unlocking the corporate network.

Read any online article about locking down user equipment and then skim through the comments. The "I've got a right to use my expensive toy on the company network" folks come out of the woodwork in force.

You are right rnturn in that giving "unsecured toys" access to the corporate crown jewels is asking for trouble.

The win-win for this is to isolate a network for unsecured devices. Give them open access to the Internet and let them read their mail, but keep them isolated from sensitive company and customer data. Assume that many of these devices will be compromised and then proceed from that premise.

After all, 99% of tablet and smartphone users only care about Internet and email anyway. Most will be pleased with that level of access.

I tried to post a comment, but it wound up linked to the Brazil story instead. :(