Juniper Research is forecasting that the ‘bring your own device’ trend will see the number of employee-owned smartphones and tablets used at work more than doubling in the next two years. By 2014 there’ll be 350 million personal mobile devices being used at work, compared to less than 150 million this year. It means almost 23% of all consumer-owned tablets and smartphones will have a business function as well.

The new report from Juniper Research points out that BYOD has been a growing trend for a number of years, driven by the rapid adoption of high-end mobile devices, the number of easily accessible apps and the growth of cloud-based services.

However, it also found that the majority of employee-owned smartphones and tablet devices did not have any form of security software loaded and did not offer any protection of company information.

Nitin Bhas, the report’s author, said “While BYOD has become an ‘inevitable’ trend for the enterprise, businesses need to create new end-user IT policies and address the key security issues emerging. New device management policies and security measures need to be put in place.”

[Whitepaper; report]