3 min
In this unprecedented situation, companies face the prospect of transitioning part or their entire workforce to telecommuting and closing their physical offices to help control the pandemic. Before COVID-19, cloud communications had seen widespread adoption, with the vast majority of organizations opting to shift one or more of their critical business functions to cloud software.
Cloud services have given companies the option to stop managing their physical servers and keep their business software running. Businesses that already use the cloud have seen an easier transition to telecommuting as Cloud Computing enables secure access to email and files, as well as the ability to share screens, hold virtual meetings, and collaborate on documents.
What Aspects Must Companies Take Into Account To Make The Transition To The Cloud?
1) Email
Email is often one of the first significant workloads that customers want to move to cloud services.
Cloud-based email provides remote access to employees’ corporate email, which is essential to enable teleworking. These services often provide additional security, such as multi-factor authentication, cybersecurity-focused threat protection, data loss prevention, and the ability to work from any device.
In this way, having access to emails hosted in the cloud gives employees many options to continue working: from home, from another country or in isolation if they require quarantine.
Organizations can also avoid capacity problems with their networks and minimize disruption to email services in the event of an outage in their own data centers.
2) Unified Communication
Unified Communication (UC) is a set of technologies that allow employees to communicate digitally, providing mechanisms such as group chat, online meetings, voice calls and web conferences. The adoption of UC tools increases productivity and generates closer communication, especially when face-to-face meetings are no longer possible.
One of the concerns of shifting from office work to full telework is that some companies feel they need greater visibility into the status of their employees. Workers also require a solution to know when a colleague is available or busy so as not to be effectively interrupted at inappropriate times. UC tools provide a response in the form of a digital presence, which is the ability to indicate the real-time status of workers’ availability to chat or meet and their location.
3) Collaboration
Collaboration tools in real time allow multiple workers to access documents, dossiers, complete tasks digitally and simultaneously share, edit and create together. Collaboration tools increase both productivity and response time for project delivery.
These files are saved in the cloud, backed up securely with version control, and can be accessed or viewed remotely. It is important to note that security policies can be applied to ensure adequate access control.
Having a backup in the cloud also provides protection and insurance against ransomware attacks.
4) Cloud Computing
Businesses look to Cloud Computing for a wide range of solutions, including access to a highly available, scalable, and secure infrastructure; data recovery and support options; and access always-up-to-date hosted business applications.
Cloud services provide a flexible model to support changing infrastructure needs. Cloud providers include capabilities to scale based on actual or projected demand. For example, companies can scale access to cloud services to incorporate new employees or reduce operations, thereby controlling costs and adapting to market conditions, as well as to meet the dynamic needs generated by the COVID-19 situation right now.
Migration of workloads to the cloud also reduces the physical burden of maintaining servers and infrastructure, which is often very difficult in a pandemic.
5) Data And Information In The Cloud
With companies adopting many software applications as a service and platform as a cloud service, it makes sense that the data ecosystem also resides in the cloud. Data cloud technologies enable customers to connect to data sources on-premises and in the cloud, and enable businesses to access data anywhere, from any device, anytime. Data in the cloud gives organizations the agility and ability to meet their immediate data needs and become more advanced capabilities in the future, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning.
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