An enterprise IT site with "no On Demand applications" is like a site with "no unencrypted WiFi access": that is, it’s more likely a fantasy than a fact. In both cases, it’s probable that low-cost consumer-grade offerings have spurred under-the-radar adoption by users who want to get their work done, whether or not their IT department is willing or able to help.

Likewise in both cases, the result is that critical data or work flows are being entrusted to systems that may have lax security or inadequate reliability.

"Providers
of enterprise-grade hosted applications, such as Salesforce.com, don’t
just make promises about such things. They go through audits to prove
to customers that their back-end servers are secure," observes Robert Mitchell in Computerworld. Thanks for noticing.

The first question is, does an IT department want to be part of the solution, and have some say in making cost/benefit tradeoffs that assure high uptime and proper data protection? The second question is, should we really need to ask the first question?

Whether you’re in the IT space, or in the adopter space, or in the On Demand developer space, it should be clear that the accessibility and the resulting productivity of On Demand applications are overwhelming. What needs to be made clear, perhaps, is that enterprise-level tasks are best done with enterprise-strength versions of those tools.

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