The latest figures from the UK National Statistics agency confirms that there is no levelling off in the increase of home-based work.

3.1 million people now officially work mainly from home.  Of these 2.4 million are teleworkers - people who work with computers and telecommunications to work at or from home. A further 1 million people in the survey were found to be working at home on a more occasional basis

The UK based company, Flexibility noted that "As well as not including less frequent/occasional homeworkers, the report also does not include people who work in the same grounds or building as their home.  So if you work from a workshop at the end of the garden or a garden office, you're probably not in the figures.  And mobile teleworkers who sometimes work at home, but don't consider it their "base" are also left out."

The growth of both home working and in particular teleworking has been one of the most marked features of workforce change in recent years, as the following table shows:

Growth in homeworking and teleworking: millions and % of UK workforce:

The search for a better work-life balance, rising property costs, the availability of new technologies and an upsurge in domestic entrepreneurship all contribute to the continuing upward trend in working from home.

We see no prospect of these trends levelling off in the near future.  Patterns of early adoption which dominate in the South East will spread throughout the UK .  That is managers, professionals and technical workers - two thirds of them male at the moment - will adopt these new ways of home based working first. 

For rising numbers of home-based entrepreneurs and teleworkers data protection in the home has become an increasingly important issue. For those running their business from home their entire livelihood could depend on a reliable data protection solution. The issue for teleworkers is that by working from home they are placing an estimated 60% of corporate data at the edge of the network on remote servers and PCs where centralised corporate backups are not able to provide adequate data protection; and that figure is certain to grow.

Being outside the corporate firewall and beyond the daily scrutiny of IT staff, distributed data is vulnerable to a host of threats. These include inconsistent backup practices, hardware failures, information theft by insiders, and lost or damaged files  – due to viruses, hackers, computer theft and accidents (eg fire, flood) .

Back2Go's DataProtector service for Remote Office and PC Data Protection offers reliable data protection for those who run their businesses from home. If you are a teleworker our DataProtector service allows you to enforce data protection policies on remote and mobile systems – automatically, consistently, and securely with minimal intervention by your IT staff and virtually no inconvenience to end users.