When Geoff Hollingworth, head of product marketing for Ericsson Cloud, speaks to corporate groups, he plays a game that starts by asking how many audience members use Dropbox.

“Pretty much everyone’s hand goes up,” Hollingworth reports. “Then I ask if their IT organization has a policy that they shouldn’t use Dropbox.” Typically, a heavy silence ensues.

So goes one of the problems companies are facing today with data-sharing apps: they want control, for security. “IT organizations are actually struggling a little bit to keep up with the speed with which their employees are actually using applications and adopting new services,” Hollingworth explains. “It’s the effect of the consumer cloud coming into the business. There’s a term for this: ‘shadow IT.’ That’s a bit of a challenge for companies.”

But with millions of workers downloading consumer and corporate mobile applications—Google Play had 1.3 million of them available as of July, Apple’s App Store, 1.2 million—IT organizations and departments must evolve their business strategies and internal operations to stay ahead of the technology curve. Often this means balancing new technical challenges with the beneficial freedoms such apps provide: On mobile, people can work where they want, when they want, and reach more customers than ever.

“What’s this mean?” Hollingworth asks, describing the revolution mobile apps have brought to the workplace. “It means people are living in the absolute now. You’re surrounded by everything you need to have wherever you are.”

Balancing the benefits and challenges of mobile is difficult, but there’s still no denying that mobile integration into workflows and product offerings is on the rise among businesses of different sizes and industries. Edo Interactive, a Chicago and Nashville-centered company with 80 employees, connects consumers to retail companies offering product promotions, through credit and debit cards. They work with credit card companies and banks, restaurant chains, big box stores, electronics and florist retailers—from Fortune 1000 companies to neighborhood coffee shops.

“The primary [mobile] tool we use is Salesforce,” says Alan Dodaro, a senior product marketing manager. Salesforce is a cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) technology. “It’s essentially your new Rolodex,” Dodaro explains. “It keeps track of your contacts as well as notes and actions you need to do. It works across desktop and mobile.”

Dodaro says his company also uses Skype and Google Hangouts; their visual capabilities make offsite employees feel more welcome than a dial-in connection would. And the company is “pivoting” its business model to align its email marketing strategies with the nationwide shift toward mobile devices.

On the personal end, Dodaro says he uses Evernote, a safe “notebook” in the cloud, where he can draft new proposals, organize what he needs for the work week, and “copy my grocery list.” He uses 1Password “to make sure all my passwords are incredibly strong, unique, and secure for both my personal and work accounts.” The new 1Password integration with iOS8 “looks incredibly promising” for its eventual ability to unlock and enter passwords with your fingerprint, adding extra security, Dodaro says.

Asked where Edo would be without mobile apps, Dodaro laughs. “Significantly behind in our workload!” he replies. “They’ve become so ingrained in our ‘every day’ that it’s not something we think of as a new, innovative product for us; it’s just business as usual.”

At the smaller end of the company universe is high-growth Speek, a two-year-old Arlington, Va., company that makes and markets proprietary software that moves conference calls to the web. In addition to their own software, CEO and co-founder John Bracken reports that his employees frequently use apps like HipChat for messaging, Google Mail, Dropbox, Todoist (a to-do app that can be shared across the organization), and—Bracken’s personal choice—Tempo: “it’s better than the iPhone calendar,” he says.

Bracken adds that with “Any app, whether mail, calendar, to-do, file storage, communications, my expectation is [these brands] all have an app that not only runs on the web but [also] runs on your mobile device.

“Having mobile apps [to process] your files and the ability to communicate with other employees is a really big deal.”

Mobile apps are just as big a deal for midsize-to-large PayPal, whose 13,000 employees worldwide use apps to move merchant and individual payments across the web securely. A big move for PayPal, reports spokeswoman Anna Parker, was its 2013 acquisition of Braintree, the online and mobile payment platform designed to power next-generation apps like Uber, Airbnb and HotelTonight. This past July, Braintree launched v.zero SDK, a Software Development Kit that enables its clients to integrate PayPal payment technology into their operations. This September, Braintree and Paypal jointly launched One Touch, a mobile payment system that requires no credit card information, shipping or billing addresses—not even usernames and passwords, according to Parker.

All these innovations admittedly open new doors to potential security risks. Yet the threat of hackers is only the biggest downside of mobile apps. There are small ones as well. Speek’s Bracken complains of apps with bugs: “They don’t work as designed.” Edo Interactive’s Dodaro emphasizes the need for “education” in using apps across an entire enterprise. And Jake Ward, executive director and co-founder of the Application Developers Alliance—a Washington, DC- based trade group whose membership includes 180 corporations and over 35,000 individuals—emphasizes that the generation gap is massive between “digital native” Millenials and their older bosses who are less adept in the mobile world.

Ward also notes that all those fancy apps have a mundane problem: Their supporting devices run out of battery life, always at the most inopportune moment.

Yet for all these problems, the benefits mobile apps can offer businesses seem to outweigh the technical challenges they often pose. “The difference [in today’s app-powered offices],” Ward explains, “is an escalation in the content that is available for things we used to need full computing power to do.”

Ward isn’t just talking about watching video. Going mobile now offers a wealth of creative capabilities on the go, from creating PowerPoint presentations and editing videos on an iPad to sifting through huge files on a mobile phone.

And on top of improved communication and increased data storage via the cloud, Ward suggests that going mobile can in fact improve security, because apps offer “the ability to lock down and harden datasets and data sources across mobile channels.” He elaborates that security measures on mobile and cloud technology don’t offset their improvements to workflows. They work “in a way that keeps data moving, keeps people moving, while giving authenticated access to a workforce.”