Estimations within the UK are that 248,800 working days were lost in 2012 at an approximate cost of £1.2 billion per day.
The breakdown of 131 days of Industrial Action within 2012 is as follows :
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63 Public company industrial action days
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68 Private company industrial action days
This is broken down as follows:
Figures source: Office for National Statistics (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_316634.pdf)
The cost to the UK small to medium business market is sizable and the ability of this market to adapt to working around the lost productivity caused by industrial action tends to be very poor.
Technology needs to adapt to work with business to offer functionality and access to work around circumstances that are outside of it's control. However the technology needs to provided at a price point that is affordable to the small to medium business sector.
What is the answer? Cloud services are key to the success of the small to medium business sector moving forward to facilitate "work from anywhere" technology that can adapt to their current and future needs. Facilitating scalability, business continuity and enterprise class security from a single supplier.
Small to medium business still need the ability to have a centralised IT support to work with them in achieving their business goals but generally cannot afford dedicated IT resources in order to achieving this. Outsourced solutions are generally the only viable option to facilitate grown and keep a control upon expenditure.
Both the outsourced support company providing this service and the end customer do not have time to deal with large amounts of different Cloud suppliers to provide the required service and the management headaches that this type of arrangement creates. So what is the answer? Hosted desktops provide a clean solution to providing each customer with a private Cloud that can facilitate growth and the ability to bolt in multiple technologies (private and public) that the end customer would not normally be able to afford. The hosted desktop provides the ability to access the company network from anywhere so in the event of industrial action employees can work remotely.
The next problem for the IT company facilitating the hosted desktop is costs and economies of scale from going it alone which tends to make most IT companies enter into hosted desktop via the reselling market. The reseller market can put many barriers in the way of the IT Company actually providing a good service to its customers which tends to put IT companies off the reselling model and equally lose interest in the hosted desktop market.
So what is the answer? VirtualTin provide a real partnership proposal that provides the IT company with its own hosted desktop business and a partner to work with them in providing the solution removing the cost barrier in going it alone.
