In the last few months, we have moved past the “remote-everything” hype and are navigating our way through the landscape of hybrid work model – a more agile, sustainable and secure work environment. For businesses and organisations, the overarching goal of boosting workforce productivity has now become critical more than ever.
According to a recent survey by Gartner,
“82% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time, while 47% said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward.”
However, one of the commonly highlighted challenges of remote work model is setting up streamlined team communication and collaboration.
Here are the five ways you can harness the power of cloud computing and Microsoft 365 solutions to transform your employees into a more productive mobile workforce.
1. Significant Cost and Time Savings
Cost savings is one of the key benefits when you are on the cloud as you only pay for what you use. Unlike expensive on-premise solutions, the cloud provides you with flexible pricing models where you invest in the resources or applications and can scale up or down as the business demands.
Adopting the cloud surely cuts down operational and collaboration costs, but it also reduces the number of hours your workforce spend in setting-up hardware and physical servers.
Cloud-based applications save you the time and effort of manually maintaining servers and installing software updates. With enterprise-grade cloud solutions like
Microsoft 365, you don’t have to dedicate an IT for regular updates and installations as the real-time, auto-upgrade feature does all the work for you. Reduced downtimes and minimal disruptions are other benefits of leveraging Microsoft 365, helping employees to execute tasks faster.
2. Virtual Collaboration + A Well Connected Workforce
Purchasing just any tool or application for collaboration and then trying to retrofit it for your workforce is not a smart move. It is important that you implement cloud-based apps into your existing framework, enabling your employees to stay well connected with their teams and make virtual interactions more inclusive from anywhere, any mobile device, anytime. Empowering your employees, including firstline workers with intelligent, efficient collaborative apps helps define the customer experience you deliver and drive the bottom line of your business. Cloud-based productivity solutions and tools have created “a true breakthrough in collaboration.”
Many technology leaders fear that migrating to cloud for virtual engagement might impact teamwork where work collaboration will end up in the backseat. However, with the right set of tools and business-class cloud model, streamlining communications, augmenting meeting productivity and building stronger teams become easier.
Microsoft Teams allows your employees to telecommute, join a meeting, send chat messages, make a call, share files and do much more to function effectively as a team. The unified collaboration hub virtually brings the entire workforce to communicate across all organisation levels. Moreover, its features like highly reliable audio-video quality, co-authoring, integrated file storage, and more result in efficient collaboration in real time.
3. Cloud Computing Solutions for Innovation and Greater Competitive Edge
In today’s global work scenario, switching from traditional, legacy applications to cloud computing solutions is the best decision you can make to drive your business forward.
Business agility and flexibility to execute remote operations have been rated as the most valued benefits of cloud computing. Cloud solutions allow you to do more, focus on critical business operations and quickly adapt to ever-changing market conditions, which are not possible with on-premise, traditional solutions. In a global survey by Harvard Business Review and Microsoft,
“85% of technology leaders said their organisations will be using cloud tools moderately to extensively... They cited the cloud’s ability to increase business speed and agility, lower costs, and enable new means of growth, innovation, and collaboration as the drivers for this fairly aggressive rate of adoption.”
Cloud enables faster and incremental innovation that not only improves time-to-market, speed of operations and execution but helps maintain a competitive edge.
4. Microsoft 365’s Integrated Productivity Apps and Cloud Services For Accelerated Workflows
Microsoft 365 keep evolving to the business’ changing needs with new product innovations and capability enhancement at a broader scale. Microsoft 365 bundles up an array of business productivity apps, including Microsoft Teams, Outlook for email, Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, SharePoint, and much more. Leveraging this productivity cloud for your business transformation will:
● Increase efficiency and accelerate remote operations.
● Create work fluidity and enhance employee cohesion.
● Stay organized and productive on-the-go with secure, real-time information sharing across different teams.
● Reduce downtime and minimize complexity with all resources available in one shared storage location (i.e. cloud-based).
5. Enablement of Enterprise Mobility with Enhanced Security
Workforce and enterprise mobility is a critical aspect geared around that one overarching goal we have been talking about – increased productivity. Moving your workforce and business operations to the cloud helps create a virtual work environment for your employees that is location-independent and can easily travel with them. With all the apps hosted and data stored on the cloud, every individual can access important files, share data with their teams, and work together on a project, even if they are half a world away.
However, data being the cornerstone and the new currency of every business, its security is a priority. Microsoft 365 among myriad cloud-based collaboration tools available provides core and advanced security layers with its intelligent Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) platform. Securing connections between employees, apps, and devices, all your sensitive, shared, and in-transit data is protected from breaches and cyber threats.
Final Thoughts
The digital shift in 2020 and increased adoption rate of remote work has changed how productivity is measured. To keep up with the current scenario, business owners need to equip their workforce with the right set of technology and collaborative tools. At the same time, employees must liberate themselves by leveraging them.
It is, therefore, no surprise that embracing cloud computing solutions like Microsoft 365 will help organisations transform their digital landscape and elevate business productivity.
As an established managed service provider, LGA understands the complex business challenges and ever-evolving customer needs. LGA’s best-in-class, comprehensive enterprise solutions across connectivity, collaboration and security domains not only strengthen your digital ecosystem but also make service delivery seamless. Get in touch with our experts and realize the true potential of your digital business today.
