Tech Trend for 2014: The Risk in BYOD Offices More work environments are adopting "bring you own device" policies but it's raising malware concerns.

Tech

It's enough to make a company lose its app-etite. From January to July of this year, 718,000 malicious and high-risk apps were distributed on the Android mobile platform alone, according to JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions at computing security firm Trend Micro in Irving, Texas. That's more than double the number of Android-based malware apps discovered in all of 2012.

This is the new open-door reality that gives nightmares to IT chiefs--and it's only getting worse. Already, more than half of the U.S. adult population connects to the internet through a smartphone or tablet, and 60 percent of businesses allow employees to access company networks via their personal devices under a strategy known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Why? The efficiencies offered by a mobile work force are too great to pass up, and moving the cost of access to the employees is too juicy a cost savings to ignore.