More than half of those surveyed also said that the amount of time they spent away from the office has increased over the past two years.
Although many businesses provide some staff with the facility to receive emails while on the move via mobile phones and PDA’s, including the ever popular Blackberry devices. Many businesses are not providing facilities for real-time access to all the applications and functionality that are available in the office.
With the availability of broadband now almost countrywide, some businesses have provided remote working, through secure VPN connections from their business traveler's homes to the office.
With companies such as BT providing wireless broadband access across the UK, in cafes, shopping centres, airports and train stations, the ability to work from anywhere has become a reality for a rapidly growing number of businesses.
On-demand services need no special security facilities such as VPN’s due to their inbuilt SSL security – the same systems that allow banks and online businesses to operate in a secure environment.
On-demand systems or applications allow authorised staff to work securely from anywhere, from home, hotel, cybercafé, on the road with a notebook or tablet pc and with any operating system – Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, Linux in fact anything with an up to date web browser.
Unlike the use of VPN’s that connect to your office systems, on-demand systems and services require no extra hardware, security systems or requirement for additional support facilities.
On-demand or sometimes called SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) or even SaaS (Software as a Service) provide full access to all the facilities business professionals need to work from any location, that could be in a hotel, overseas or even at a clients.
The demand for on-demand systems is growing almost as fast as the number of products and facilities are launched.