The rise of webbased software such as office application is a blessing to our world. It enables us flexworkers (as we are called in Holland) to work from anywhere using some internet connection and it save us freelancers lots of money. Well, actually, that's not completely true as you can use OpenOffice or NeoOffice, but, if you want to work on documents with several people, Zoho's Virtal Office or Google's Docs & Spreadsheets comes in very handy. According to the New York Times, online office apps are a possible threat : Office personel leaks information out through this 'hole'. To be exact, lots of people copy their email to personal accounts, making it more vulnerable to information theft.

Corporate techies - who, after all, are paid to worry - want strict control over internal company communications and fear that forwarding e-mail might expose proprietary secrets to prying eyes. Employees just want to get to their mail quickly, wherever they are, without leaping through too many security hoops.(New York Times)

I've been in a situation like that where it was impossible to reach my corporate email from outside the office *but* I was supposed to read it. So I used the trick of forwarding it to another mail account. And yes, that is a possible security threat. I am however working as a unix admin, and I the solution doesn't come with closing everything up - the solution is in encryption, a working solution a lot of people try to keep away from as they fear the unknown.