Get more from your tech and your team – Effective strategies for cost effective remote working

Maximise value and improve efficiency with the Cloud

To say that 2020 has been a challenging year for businesses across our state would be an understatement. Lockdown enforcement has at times shut down entire industries and forced others to adopt often difficult and unwelcome changes to the ways they do business.

 

With schools returning and the state moving away from ‘phase-based’ lockdown arrangements, it feels like there is a little light at the end of the tunnel. However, there remains the possibility that further restrictions will be imposed on an outbreak-by-outbreak basis, with the prospect of zip-code level restrictions to target the worst affected areas.

 

For businesses, this means remaining vigilant and being ready for the possibility of further upheaval.

 

Working with clients over the past 5 or 6 months it’s also become clear that value for money is at the top of their agenda. More than ever our customers are looking for agile, cost-effective, flexible, and low-commitment solutions that empower productivity while providing a great return on investments. It’s a balancing act; your team need no-compromise, empowering solutions that enable them to do a great job, but you don’t want those tools to cost the earth.

 

Fortunately, small to medium-sized businesses can now gain affordable access to technology that was once the preserve of huge corporations with massive IT budgets. Let’s take a look at some of these solutions.

 

The Cloud

For small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, the cloud offers access to computing resources that would previously have been well out of reach. We’re all familiar with cloud services in some form; from dropbox and google drive accounts to cloud-hosted software from the likes of salesforce – it’s everywhere.

 

The Cloud’s ‘x as a service’ concept allows businesses to pay for services or computing resources on a subscription basis. These subscriptions can usually be scaled up or scaled down depending on user demand and avoid the costly capital expenditure of fixed, physical infrastructure. There are 3 main ways the Cloud can benefit your business:

 

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a service). Pay for virtualised computing resources on a subscription basis. Virtual machines, networking infrastructure, virtual servers and storage can all be acquired on a pay-as-you-go basis without the hassle and cost of setting up and maintaining on-site hardware. Of all the cloud computing models, IaaS offers businesses the most flexibility and control. Capacity can be scaled up or down as required and you retain control over things like server architecture and middleware.
• PaaS (Platform as a service). Pay for a cloud-hosted platform to develop applications. The service provide will give you the tools, infrastructure and operating system necessary for your business to develop its own applications – simplifying the app building process by removing much of the backend management burden. Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services are familiar examples of PaaS providers.
• SaaS (Software as a service). We’re all familiar with this one. In the past, running a software programme meant paying for a license and then downloading the software onto your PC.

 

Now, companies are increasingly offering cloud-hosted programmes on a subscription basis – the essence of the SaaS model. SaaS has several main advantages compared to the traditional software model: 

 

• • Access the service from anywhere – all you need is an internet connection.
  • Updates are taken care of – Because SaaS applications are centrally-hosted, the provider takes care of any updates for you – maintenance is not your problem!
  • No hardware investment required
  • Subscriptions are scalable. Subscriptions are often on a per-user/per-month basis – pay only for what you need, not what you don’t.

 

Office 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify and HubSpot are some high-profile examples of SaaS offerings.

 

With flexible subscriptions, the elimination of upfront costs reduced maintenance overheads and the ability to access the services you need remotely, there’s never been a better time to explore the transformative potential of Cloud services.

 

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