There was an interesting post (now sadly removed) from a delegate at the Office2.0 conference which flew in the face of the current convention: a man who fears that he has lost he his laptop but loses no sleep about the data he might have lost. Okay, so losing something as valuable as a portable computer would have been no laughing matter and then there is all the hassle with filling out insurance forms, sourcing a new machine etc, but (and here is the crucial difference) no panic about the data that’s been lost with it. No fear about personal information falling into the wrong hands. No paranoia about identify theft.

The difference? This owner of this particular laptop relies on his laptop for little more than access to the internet. No data is stored on it (and in all likelihood virtually no applications either). He is a proponent of Office2.0 technology and as a result his data is all stored on secure, backed-up, safely housed, hulking great servers that can’t get left in the back of a taxi or dropped down the back of a pub sofa.

Okay, so I no it is not as black and white as that and there are plenty of potential risks to data security posed by reliance on external service providers and wireless internet connections – but all the same, perhaps in the current climate there is something to be said for moving back to a situation where the client machine is little more than a dumb terminal, devoid of stored data and therefore devoid of risk and of value to a third party. A move which Office 2.0 is perfectly placed to enable. It lets your staff wander around the country with laptops, it lets them work wherever they need and it lets them have access to the data they require - it just doesn’t let them take it with them, with all the attendant risks this seems to bring…