The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is making changes to its IT system to allow its employees to work from home.

Last year, the firm signed a deal with Fujitsu – which was worth around £240 million – in order to move 55,000 RBS employees onto a desktop transformation platform. This will allow them to work from home, but it will also reduce the bank's expenditure on technology, which previously reached £1.5 billion a year.

The virtualised platform will allow people to access their desktops from remote locations. To ensure that the service is reliable, two data centres will be used to store the information, so that even if one is to go down, there will be a second copy of the information available.

Mark Diamond, chief information officer at RBS, observed at a Citrix Synergy conference recently that businesses often struggle to see the benefits in installing systems such as this.

Computer Weekly reported Mr Diamond as suggesting that the case for virtualisation needs to be presented with the business in mind. "The business doesn't care about tech jargon. The business does not understand technology," he remarked. "But it does understand that we need to change the way we work," he said.