Extreme weather, tube strikes, G20 protests, postal disruption: recent events have highlighted the need for all small businesses to be able to work away from the office. Imerja’s Mark Evans looks back at an eventful year for small firms.

Driving down cost is at the centre of most business decisions these days. Innovative firms have looked to implement flexible benefits to replace bonuses and help retain key employees. At the same time, a recent catalogue of man-made and natural crises has seen the mobile working revolution gather momentum. Businesses are increasingly recognising tangible benefits from working away from the office and have begun to see it as an essential part of an overall business continuity strategy.

A YouGov survey revealed that the recent extreme weather affected over 70% of workers in the UK and over a hundred million working hours have been lost by staff not being able to make it into the office or having a much longer commute than normal. The recent heavy snow has merely served to highlight the need for businesses to have flexible working in place; many events last year also demonstrated this very same point.

Anyone using the UK motorway infrastructure on a regular basis will have experienced gridlock, and probably frustration at being unproductive for long periods as the chaos clears. Although we may reluctantly accept the daily inconvenience of travel disruption and delay as part of working life, there is a direct cost to business.

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Private cloud computing

The claim that more than a quarter of IT executives are planning to deploy private cloud in 2009 is the latest recognition of steadily changing attitudes in IT departments.

Improved efficiency, better scalability and cost cutting are traditionally cited as the drivers for using applications delivered in the cloud – and despite the previous reluctance within the public sector to embrace this way of working, it is starting to generate interest, particularly with the government directive for IT energy consumption to be carbon neutral by 2012, and completely carbon neutral throughout its lifecycle by 2020 .

Demand for cloud applications continues to drive growth in data centres around the globe, but of particular note is the increase in requirements for complex hosting services, offering far more than a ’rack and stack’ environment. With the burden of compliance and availability taken away complex hosting saves time and money, reduces carbon emissions, and helps business work more efficiently.

As the business community shifts towards IT being delivered as a service it will become increasingly important for organisations to consider carefully who they entrust to host their infrastructure and deliver applications to an increasingly mobile workforce.