Have you been caught out by the weather this week?
Staff snowed in and unable to get to work?
Lost productivity resulting from “snow days” costs UK businesses millions of pounds every year which coupled with an unstable economy has crippled many small companies.
But by setting yourself up for cloud computing, you can minimise these losses ensuring business continuity and maximising productivity throughout the winter months.
Cloud computing solutions, quite simply, take your business data out of your office and place it in “the cloud” – which is basically a huge datacentre run by your IT provider. Your data is then hosted in the datacentre and accessed by you and your employees via the internet. Which means that when the snow falls and staff are stuck at home they can carry on working as normal with full access to company data and emails.
And Microsoft’s cloud offering takes it a few steps further. Office 365 not only lets employees access, share, update and save documents from a central location, but also lets them make real-time contact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, live web conferencing and online meetings. And of course email, calendar and contacts access on any devices – desktop, laptop or mobile.
Of course, cloud computing is dependent on a reliable internet connection but most of us have one of those these days. It’s also more cost effective to set-up and run than an on-premise solution as it removes the need to purchase and maintain expensive servers in your offices. Cloud computing effectively converts your IT from a capital cost into a running cost as you pay your provider on a monthly basis to rent the space in their datacentres, which can make budgeting easier.
So in many ways, it’s win win. Cloud computing cuts costs and ensures consistency of productivity which in turn saves you money. Which in the current financial climate, is something we are all striving to achieve.
