Cloud services were growing quickly in popularity before the Covid crisis, but the pandemic has poured rocket fuel on the trend. Business investment in cloud services is snowballing.
It’s possible for employees to work from home the old-fashioned way, by connecting via VPN to your on-premise servers to access applications and data. But it’s a slow, clunky and a potentially insecure way to do it.
In the rest of this article we’ll look at cloud productivity: what it is, why it’s so important and how to maximise it for the benefit of your hybrid workforce and your business.
Cloud productivity tools
The upshot of this revolution is that you can now do pretty much everything you used to with desktop software in the cloud. The popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) has grown exponentially in recent years.
Most of us are used to using cloud-based productivity tools like Office 365 and G Suite. Many businesses now also utilise cloud services for accountancy and bookkeeping, customer relationship management (CRM), stock management and more. More and more organisations are turning to cloud-based communication and collaboration tools.
It’s easy to see why. The obvious benefit of SaaS applications is that they’re easily accessible from anywhere, far more so than services hosted on an office network.
But the benefits of SaaS don’t stop there.
Anywhere work
Cloud-based productivity tools aren’t just available anywhere, they’re generally accessible from a range of devices. So, if you only have your smartphone or tablet with you, you can still do valuable work. Turning to cloud-based productivity means work evolves from an office-based activity to one that is only reliant on an internet connection.
Always up to date
Scale in seconds
It’s cost-effective
It’s secure and available
Carry on in a crisis
How to ensure cloud productivity
So effectively equipping remote and hybrid staff is to some extent a case of investing in the right cloud applications for their needs. For most SMEs this might include tools for document creation and editing, remote collaboration, CRM and bookkeeping, though the details will depend on your business and sector.
But there are other factors to consider to ensure your remote teams can work efficiently. One potential weakness of relying on a suite of cloud services is connectivity. In a word, if a remote worker’s internet connection goes down, or slows to snail pace, their productivity plummets as a result. If your connection drops out, so does your business.
The first thing that SMEs need to know before investing in cloud services is that their connectivity is up the task. Standard connections can soon become stretched when employees are connecting to data-hungry services like video conferencing. You should have enough bandwidth to allow employees to connect to the services they need without any slowdown in day-to-day activities.
Optimising your network for cloud
But bandwidth alone isn’t enough. When your business relies on the cloud, ensuring your network is healthy and optimised is crucial.
That isn’t straightforward, because it means ensuring every link in your network is operating to the best of its ability. Monitoring link health to predict and fix problems, and to channel data around an underperforming link so that performance isn’t affected, can be an overly technical and time-consuming task for SMEs in particular.
In other words, you don’t just need effective cloud services, you also need a network that is agile, reliable and optimised for your needs, providing a consistent experience to remote employees wherever they’re based. For SMEs, this is often achieved through third-party support.
SD-internet is the answer
A third-party provider like Everything Voice can monitor your Internet Connections and those of your home workers to ensure that they are always performing at their peak, and to quickly fix any issues that come to light.
One effective way they can do this is through SD-INTERNET, a managed network service designed to reduce IT cost and complexity while improving cloud performance and reliability.
Through SD-INTERNET, support providers can protect users and applications against link outages. They constantly monitor link health and quickly act to reroute traffic if a link drops out. That means all your inbound and outbound services continue to operate flawlessly.
SD-INTERNET is also agile, allowing you to diversify bandwidth access and add new sites quickly and easily. It can prioritise services, meaning that audio and video conferencing, for instance, are always smooth and crystal clear. It means third-party providers can manage your end-to-end connectivity to provide low-latency access to business cloud applications.
A rounded approach to cloud productivity
The take home here is that cloud productivity is about equipping your remote and hybrid staff with the cloud services they need, but that’s not all.
When you rely on your network and connectivity, you need to make sure it’s always working optimally on your behalf. Bandwidth is one half of that equation, and network health is another.
By utilising solutions like SD-INTERNET, you can create an efficient, agile network that prioritises business cloud services and ensures key applications – like video conferencing – are always running smoothly.
For more information on cloud communications, network monitoring, link health and SD-INTERNET, please contact our specialist team.