With the current and most recent announcement that home working should once again be the norm, at least for the next 6 months, we are now finding that many local Swindon Businesses were not really at grips with the technology that was required to make it happen.
Overnight companies had to get to grips with how they could continue operating in these unique circumstances. Some, like manufacturing and hospitality, were left high and dry, while others discovered that only a radical shift in working practices would enable them to continue to operate through lockdown. I mean lets be honest, how many people knew what a VPN was, and as for Zoom, it was just something we would hear our children saying when playing with cars.
All of sudden a number of our clients realised that the investment they had made in cloud-based solutions were paying dividends. Suddenly they had found that they could enable their staff to work from home while retaining full access to all necessary files and applications. There are many good reasons for embracing the Cloud – Covid 19 is demonstrating this as an extreme example.
In simple terms we are referring to online services; to hosted server services which can be accessed from anywhere, to file management systems that allow you to control and distribute workload and information, and to software that originates on the web although it can be installed locally. In the Cloud computing model, none of these need physically reside in your premises, which if non one is actually on site is proving to be a godsend.
Naturally, there is still client hardware, network equipment, laptops and printers and these still need to be managed. But with the cloud, these tasks are made easier. Updates are done remotely and we can all create PDFs and send them without requiring a printer, and even fault diagnosis can be done without attendance.
During the period of lockdown, we have supported clients who had already invested in Cloud technology, and those who maintained a more ‘traditional’ IT approach.
We are able to handle both situations, but clients who had already adopted Cloud technology definitely found the transition from office home working far simpler with less disruption.
In fact recently we have been highlighting the benefits of cloud to numerous clients that have still not made the leap (but will now find themselves having to). With cloud, the benefits far outweigh any cons…
· It is cost effective – you only pay only for what you need
· It is strategic – Fully agile, allowing you to respond to changes quickly
· It is resilient – backups and restorations are simple
· Software integration is a breeze
· Full Mobility – could services can be accessed from anywhere with pretty much any type of equipment
· Deployment – no time-consuming hardware rollouts
· It is scalable – it’s easy to match your resources to your business needs, so when your business needs increase, the cloud can cope.
As you know, Systems Integration are Microsoft partners and we have can advise all our clients on the benefits of tools such as MS Azure servers, Egnyte and Datto, all of which provide the perfect platform for such industry-standard productivity tools like MS Office 365. This makes integration, sharing, collaboration and teamwork easy, regardless of the physical location of staff members.
And as we are fully aware of the Security requirements for any Business IT strategy, we can ensure any cloud migration/transition your business undertakes will be done safely.
If you haven’t yet embraced the Cloud, it’s high time you considered it. We have years of experience in bringing together the best of the best in terms of file storage, management and end-user applications to give your business the security and agility it needs to cope with the unseen potholes of modern commerce.
We’re always happy to spend time with you to find ways to improve your IT structures and add greater flexibility and value to your business.
Book a chat with us and find out how the Systems Integration and the Cloud can help YOUR business thrive instead of falter during the next 6 months…