There are numerous advantages to migrating most of your management and storage needs over to the cloud. In the following paragraphs, I’m going to detail 5 of the most significant advantages of integrating your apps and data into a cloud based management environment.
Each of the following saves you money in one way or the other, increasing profits and helping to improve your relationships with your employees, vendors and customers.
1. The Cloud makes your office accessible from everywhere.
This is the most obvious advantage to cloud computing and storage, but there’s more to this than the added flexibility of being able to access all your company data when you and your employees are out on sales or customer service calls.
- A sick employee with a strong work ethic no longer has to take a day off work because they can’t come to the office for fear of infecting other staff.
- A snow day no longer has to mean your office shuts down for the entire day.
- Cars breaking down suddenly, employees missing trains, etc. All you and your employees need is a laptop or mobile device and an Internet connection to get the job done.
Research is mounting about the benefits of allowing certain kinds of employees to work remotely. On average, remote employees log at least 4 more hours of productive work per week and would even consider taking up to a 6% salary reduction if they could work remotely, as opposed to in an office environment. Studies like this one do suggest that those who benefit most from a cloud office are those who perform mundane, repetitive tasks like call center work, secretarial duties, data entry, programmers, copy editing, web administrators, etc.
2. Easy collaboration and project management
When you institute a cloud based work environment into your company, it puts everyone in the company on the same page, without the need to sit shoulder to shoulder in a meeting. Everything from a project management and collaboration perspective is all held in the cloud, in one central location such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. This is a major bonus for everyone, but particularly for remote workers living in different time zones, where emails are often the only way for these workers to keep in touch.
Tools like the new Skype for Business are great for video conferencing and sharing files for viewing, while project management apps like Wrike, and sales and marketing collaboration tools like SalesForce allow users to input data on the fly without the need to be connected to a central server in your offices. Managers, employees and outside contractors can all access project-related data, make approval requests, submit bids, etc. – all with relative ease. This also cuts down on data entry costs and the worry of lost customer, project, and financial data that never makes it back to the company servers. Several software integration companies also offer solutions for managing third party vendors and other systems in a single, unified platform.
3. Improved accounting efficiency
In days gone by, employees had to hang onto and itemize their paper receipts, then send them to accounting for approval and storage. With cloud-based accounting apps like Expensify and Zoho integrating with Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive and/or your Quickbooks account, receipts can be uploaded immediately and the employee can get immediate approval, payables reminders can be sent to multiple accounting team members rather than leaving important time-sensitive outstanding bills in the hands of one or two people.
Everyone can see what’s going on in real time. Many of the apps out there allow you to set timers to pay specific invoices on a set day, or send out auto-reminders to customers about their outstanding balance. Portable point-of-sale systems like Stripe now make it possible for your sales team to take immediate e-payments, which further reduces the need for excessive invoicing and puts instant cash right into your company account.
4. No more lost data
The cloud is indeed still in its infancy, but with security and disaster recovery services like CloudLock offering a 100% guarantee that they can restore any lost data instantly, just as it was before someone accidently deleted it, it’s safe to say that the cloud has certainly entered an era where a clunky old office server isn’t necessary anymore. This means a significant amount of time and resources are saved swapping drives and monitoring your storage equipment too.
Cloud providers take care of your backup and recovery needs, out of sight and out of mind. It used to take companies an average of 8 hours to recover from a data disaster, while companies now using the cloud can boast average recovery times of 2.5 hours. You pay your premiums to the service provider and when there’s a problem, there’s no extra charges to recover the lost data either, compared to the average $9000 recovery costs that most SMB’s could expect just a few years ago when their traditional backup methods suddenly failed. Also consider what happens if your office has a freak accident like a fire or is flooded…
5. Security
Where to begin with all the security benefits offered by switching to the cloud?
Security updates are done automatically. There’s no need for you or employees to carry crucial company data around on a laptop anymore, all you need is a password to access the cloud provider’s servers. When an employee is fired, you needn’t worry that they’ve still got hard drives full of data about your latest projects, you can disable their cloud access with the click of a button.
Have any benefits of your own to share?
Leave a quick comment and let me and your fellow readers know.
