Why Cloud Computing is Important for Your Business’ Reopen Strategy
At press (May 6, 2020) the BC Government is preparing to announce its reopening strategy for a variety of business sectors throughout the province. No matter which industry you find yourself in, you too are preparing to resume operations even if you must wait a little longer than those deemed more “essential”. We have already provided a look at why increased IT support is important to a successful reopening, but now we look deeper into one key component – the cloud. In order for your organization’s reopening strategy to result in sustainable success you will want to adopt or increase (as applicable) your cloud computing capabilities. Here’s why.
4 Reasons Why Increased Adoption of the Cloud is Critical to a Successful Return to Business After the Mandatory Closures of 2020
1. It Will Reduce Your Costs
There is one common theme amongst all businesses who are preparing to reopen – an extremely tight budget. After months of revenue reduction or outright cessation you are reopening with limited capital and need to keep ongoing costs at a minimum for the interim. From an IT infrastructure perspective, this means reducing overhead that once went to expensive physical severs, routers, and cabling along with the on-site management and resources (electrical, HVAC, etc.) required to maintain the network. Whether you currently depend on on-premises solutions such as a dedicated server space or a full-scale private data center facility you will enjoy reduced costs by switching to the cloud via a trusted cloud provider.
2. It Will Better Prepare You for Sustainable Growth
You’re about to be faced with a good problem to have. While there will be some early trepidation, consumers are chomping at the bit to return to the products and services that they were not able to access through the economic shutdown. After your business was forced to scale back to reduce overhead, you will be scrambling to meet this renewed demand. The traditional computing systems that you once used to manage inventory, human resources, and general operations will not be able to keep up. However, it will be hard to predict exactly when this significant uptick in business will kick in, so early investment in “upsized” productivity solutions can disrupt the cash flow needed to sustain you during the early reopening phase. What do to? You guessed it – the cloud. The cloud is the only truly scalable business productivity solution that grows as you need it. Adoption ensures that you will have the IT infrastructure required to quickly expand capacity exactly when you need to – no sooner and no later.
3. It Will Protect and Enhance Productivity Even When Staff Remain Remote
Reopening does not mean a complete return to operations as they were at the onset of 2020. Staffing will look significantly different for quite some time. There will be a number of contractors, employees, partners, and vendors who once frequented your physical space that will now conduct a portion or all of their duties from a remote location. You may be concerned about a loss of productivity as a result. Traditionally this would be a fair concern, but when you effectively migrate to a superior cloud productivity solution the result is the exact opposite. Take cloud-based MS Office 365 as a prime example. When your organization subscribes to this software-as-a-service you gain access to robust organizational collaboration tools such as MS Teams which will enable staff and executives to better coordinate on revenue generating projects and tasks.
4. It Will Better Prepare You for Potentially Damaging Events
You may not have prescribed to the “anything can happen” mantra in the past but that has certainly gone out the window. 2020 has taught us to expect the unexpected, and plan accordingly. For businesses an updated disaster response protocol is required with enhanced data backup and recovery procedures. This is necessary to account for cyber attacks (which have grown since COVID 19), weather events, power outages, internal sabotage, and any other unfortunate incident. To help you devise this strategy, SAV Technology has provided a 5-step guide to developing your disaster recovery plan where you’ll find the most important step – increased cloud adoption. By migrating operations to the cloud you take the power away from unexpected and potentially damaging events.
Learn more about SAV Cloud, with data-centres in both Vancouver BC and Toronto ON. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your organization leverage the cloud as a part of your reopening strategy.