Forecast 2014: Boost your mobile bandwidth

In addition, organizations assume that a swap to the cloud is simple but don't always consider the bandwidth needed for the back-and-forth data movement. "Every CIO's nightmare is the complaint that bandwidth access to a particular application is faster from my home network versus the enterprise," Hanselman says.

Such expectations are not lost on Horn. With departments such as radiology primed to go mobile, the Advocate Health Care IT team has to tread lightly. "We know that radiology, which needs high-quality resolution and performance, will be a tremendous consumer of wireless bandwidth -- maybe even its No. 1 consumer," Horn says. A wired workstation with a 1Gbps interface lets users access an image such as an MRI in two to three seconds. "That same image could take a minute or two over the wireless network," he explains.

Also, he worries about the quality of images transmitted wirelessly. With today's technology, "it would be hard to get the image in and buffered quickly," Horn says. Before moving forward, he would put wireless networks to the test to ensure that the performance is good and the images are high quality.

"Wireless has so many practical limitations that we're very careful to [make sure] we don't bring about expectations that aren't attainable," he says.

In the next 12 months, do you anticipate allowing employees to bring more, fewer or the same number of consumer devices/technologies into your organization