5 Must-have Productivity Tools For Your Workforce

We live in an age where time is money. For entrepreneurs, this is even more critical. The faster they can meet their customer demands, the greater will be the benefits for their business. But what makes service delivery faster and without any deficiency in quality?  The answer lies in building and nurturing a productive workforce. The more productive your workforce is, the better the quality of service they render. To perform well in less time, it takes more than just the technical and soft skills of an employee. They have to manage their workloads, plan strategically for every assigned task and stay on top of priority assignments without distractions. This is where productivity tools can be a game-changer for today’s highly demanding work culture in businesses that are big or small. 

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

If you were wondering about which ones to invest in for your workforce, here is a roundup of the top 5 productivity tools that successful organizations ensure their workforce has access to:

1. Smart Email Management Tools

By 2022, it is expected that an average of 347 billion emails will be sent online daily. Emails are still considered to be the number one communication channel in official environments for peers to communicate with each other and in groups. On a daily basis, an employee spends a significant amount of time opening and or responding to emails. However, only a very small portion of the emails that an employee gets in a day may be ones that require urgent attention or action from their side. 

A smart email management tool will empower employees to filter out important emails more effectively and prioritize responses depending on the severity of the content in each email. Using intelligent filters, mails can be grouped and separated into folders wherein higher priority mails can be easily identified and responded to at the earliest while others can wait in a priority queue for later responses.

2. Calendar Management

One of the first things that employees do when they step into work every day is to check their calendars for any important meetings or events that are scheduled for the day or soon. As far as productivity goes in this regard, smart solutions that notify users about calendar events that they should pay attention to in the immediate future, are a must-have. Additionally, it should be easy for them to organize meetings on the go with peers who may be in the same office or at a different city or from anywhere in the world if you have remote working policies in the workplace. 

The calendar management application should be able to manage time zone variations and block time accordingly for participants, check dependencies with other schedules and manage several other factors to ensure that every stakeholder is readily available for important sessions. Besides, these solutions should enable employees to access their schedules from any device they are using be it mobiles or PC or Laptops when they are in the office or shuttling between work and home.

3. Task Management

One of the most essential tools for any workforce to be productive is a task management tool. From noting down things as a ‘To do’ list to assigning responsibilities and roles to individuals collaborating on a project, task management tools perform a wide variety of activities in an office environment. It helps employees to stay on track with their committed deadlines and work simultaneously on multiple tasks without losing a grip on individual tasks and their priorities. It also allows managers to move people between projects or tasks for better utilization and improved productivity. 

Having a highly flexible task management platform enables organizations to bring out the best results from teamwork and reward performers for their extra efforts when necessary.

4. Collaboration Channels

In fast-paced business environments, there is a need for people from different streams or with different skills to come together and create solutions for challenging customer scenarios. This requires powerful collaboration channels that offer a host of features such as innovative meeting schedulers, video or audio conferencing and call solutions, remote file, and media exchange facilities, access-controlled storage, and virtual workspaces. 

By bringing on-board such solutions, enterprises can empower their workforce to unleash their ideas and work together as a team to arrive at the best fit solution for a problem. This happens irrespective of geographical or time zone constraints and allows people to manage their workloads, handle dependencies and ensure strict compliance to standards in client service delivery.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

5. Engaging Intranet Platforms

A workplace environment today has a large population of millennials who prefer a highly engaged work culture if they are to think about a long career with you. For this, there is a need to bring in a social infrastructure where everyone in your organization can connect with each other, get to know about events and happenings in the workplace, organize team-building or interactive sessions and collaborate effectively in your work environment. This is precisely what modern-day intranet solutions offer for enterprises.

You need to bring in a social media-inspired platform for Intra organizational interactions. An intranet facilitates the building of a community within your workforce where people converse and gain knowledge about all things related to work or outside.

Related Reading: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

By establishing better social conversations around a wide range of topics, intranets allow employees to find peers with similar interests, create subgroups or forums for topic-related discussions, have one on one conversations via instant messaging and improve overall communication. The possibilities that will be unlocked are humongous.

Creating a productive workforce today depends highly on providing the right set of digital tools for staff to manage their work efficiently. Here is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be a real game-changer. It brings together a host of features like Calendar and Task Management, Intranet and File Exchange channels, Collaborative Document and file management, etc. all under one roof. Get in touch with us to know more about InfinCE.

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

For every small business today, the key to success lies in empowering their workforce to work together in the best possible way to deliver value to customers. This is true irrespective of the industry that your business focuses. Studies show that nearly 39% of employees feel that people in their organization do not value the importance of collaboration. Team collaboration is all about bringing everyone on the same page. But it is easier said than done. For small businesses, you have the benefit of having to bring fewer people into the same wavelength, but the core challenges of collaboration like communication, transparency, and accountability need to be addressed as much as what bigger players do. So how can small businesses improve team collaboration and promote a culture of continuous employee engagement in their work environment? Here are some tips:

1.Create a Unified Vision

To foster a culture of collaboration, it is important to ensure that all your employees work to achieve a common goal. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a powerful vision for the organization and then seamlessly connect the end objective of every project or work your company undertakes, to this vision statement. This will ensure that irrespective of the team or project an employee is a part of, they will work towards achieving the common goal as defined in the vision. For example, if the vision is total customer satisfaction, then every effort your workforce puts in can be seamlessly translated into steps taken in achieving maximum customer satisfaction. This vision statement or concept can be used in the awareness sessions to help team members bond with each other, understand their responsibilities and realize the need to be accountable for one’s own actions so that the collective effort of the team is successful in the end.

Related Reading: The Office Of The Future – 5 Innovations To Know

2. Smarter On-Boarding

It is often found that new joiners in a company or in a team face difficulty in getting acquainted with the culture and nature of work in the first few weeks or months in the company. This is predominantly due to weak onboarding policies at small companies which pretty much focuses on sharing a couple of PowerPoint slides about the company and expecting new joiners to automatically align themselves with the goals and culture prevalent. Instead, companies should cultivate a smarter onboarding experience by getting rid of boring presentation sessions and documents. They should instead, pair newcomers with an existing team member who can guide them into the company’s routine and help them adapt faster to the culture prevalent in the workplace.

3.Ensure Effective Task Management

There are many instances where employees need to collaborate and work together on projects. In today’s highly competitive talent market, some of these employees may be remotely located as well. Small businesses need to invest in empowering your resources to collaborate efficiently over tasks irrespective of where they are geographically located. Using a powerful platform like InfinCE, your business can ensure there is a virtual space for employees to work together and with accountability for each action. Such platforms allow you to monitor task progress, enable smooth interaction between colleagues, facilitate the exchange of files and documents related to work and much more. Managers can efficiently manage their team with improved transparency and unbiased decision, thanks to insights from such employee management solutions. The end result is better team collaboration and improved productivity levels in the organization. When tasks and people are brought under a common technology framework, it keeps employees organized, managers aware of their team’s progress and clients happy about fulfilled commitments on delivery.

Related Read: InfinCE – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

4.Encourage Transparent Communication

A key driver of team collaboration in any business environment is open and transparent communication. Only when people strike a comfortable level of conversation with each other, do they develop mutual respect, trust, and understanding for their colleagues. For organizations, there are several ways to encourage a culture of open communication. A big part of the exercise involves mentoring managers to promote a healthy atmosphere for open communication and not a culture that works by just giving and obeying orders. 

It is important to bring technology into the picture here to work as an enabler for open communication. Most of the organizations typically use just an email system for employees to communicate. However, employees need more than just a simple email system. Bring on-board a powerful intranet system with social media-inspired virtual news spaces for sharing news and information about the company, activities, and events planned and much more. Employees can express their responses for such intranet posts similar to what they do on social media like Facebook. Another option would be to have a good instant messenger system where employees can converse with each other in real-time for a better understanding of problems and scenarios.

5.Promote Socializing Outside of Work

Every employee in your small business has a side of talent, skill or ability that can help them create healthier conversations and relationships with others. As an organization, you need to create avenues for employees to socialize and celebrate their individual and personal skills. Team building exercises, lunches, dinners, and sponsored team vacations or holidays where employees can get to know their colleagues better are just a few ideas to use. This will enable them to build better working relationships in parallel and stand up for each other in collaborative tasks with more responsibility and trust.

Team collaboration is vital to ensuring the continuous growth and success of every small business. Having the right vision, the most relevant business processes and the best technology is the way forward to achieving excellence in team collaboration. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can be the game-changer in enabling a collaborative and productive work culture within your organization.  

6 Tips to Ensure Secure File Transfers Within Your Organization

To survive tough market conditions like dynamic consumer trends and rising competition, businesses continuously invest to set up new and innovative digital frontiers that enable them to offer superior end-user experiences. The movement of enterprise systems to the cloud is perhaps the biggest driver of the digital transformation of today’s business. However, the growth of digital capabilities has resulted in more volumes of data generated across the operational landscapes of businesses. This data includes everything from your environment’s conditions, to sensitive customer data. With a large number of employees deployed to work on this data for delivering more valuable insights, a key security challenge that comes into the picture for enterprises is file sharing. There is so much focus on this area that studies predict a market size of over USD 10.94 billion for enterprise file sharing and synchronization by the year 2023. 

So how can your organization ensure that file sharing is seamlessly enabled for your workforce while safeguarding data integrity and protection requirements? Here are 6 tips you can consider implementing in your organization:

1.Improve awareness

The first step in creating a secure file sharing environment within your organization is to make sure that everyone knows the risks involved when confidential information goes out of their business systems and into the wrong hands. Surveys have shown that over 95% of staff working in an office can access data from their organization which they do not actually require.

So, to ensure that sensitive information doesn’t go out of your organization into the wrong hands, employees need to be constantly educated about the fallouts that occur due to data leaks and also how to efficiently share official files without inviting risky security threats. Carry out periodic learning sessions for all employees on best practices in file sharing, invite experts in to deliver lessons on file-sharing conventions and take precautions to ensure that your employees do not commit mistakes that turn up as big blows with regards to sensitive information leaking during file sharing.

2.Keep your business systems up to date

Security threats evolve by the minute if you look at what is happening in the market today. Leading solution providers for your business operational systems like CMS and other file management systems often release security updates every now and then to counter newly identified threats. It is important for you to keep these systems up to date and incorporate suggestions and recommendations given by service providers from time to time to keep out security threats and prevent mishandling of sensitive data during file transfer or exchange operations.

Related Reading: What’s Involved In Renewing An SSL Certificate?

3.Implement a holistic security management system

While most organizations have some form of security assurance applications deployed across their IT landscape, it often has supervisory control over just a few areas like email or FTP alone. When you select a security solution, it is wise to opt for an integrated suite of security systems that offers comprehensive coverage for all your enterprise information access and exchange points like email, file management, content management systems, hardware ports, and so on.

This will offer effective monitoring of all enterprise communication points and will guarantee more secure file sharing mechanisms and prevent leakage of sensitive information. Such solutions also offer permission-based access control for enterprise information repositories with robust tracking of who accesses what at which time. This will prevent any deliberate attempts for data breaches due to the fear of being exposed during regular security audits.

4.Use cloud-based systems for file exchange

Eliminate the use of hardware devices like USB flash storage disks and drives for copying data within the enterprise. Provide effective cloud-based file transfer solutions that enable employees to seamlessly and securely access organizational data from anywhere with proper monitoring and logging of activities surrounding this data access. If your organization continues to permit the usage of USB based storage hardware, then there may be instances where organizational data copied into these devices may get corrupted or fall into the wrong hands if the employee loses the device or carelessly manages its usage.

Related Reading: Mitigating The Top 5 Challenges Of Cloud Integration

5.Promote encryption techniques

The best way to ensure that sensitive information is protected during file sharing is by encrypting such information. Be it on online file exchange tools or hardware devices, there are several solutions that encrypt information and make it unreadable for any unauthorized party who tries to access the data at any time.

Powerful algorithms can safeguard data integrity by ensuring that only stakeholders with the right encryption key can unlock sensitive organizational data and this data access is properly logged and monitored by the enterprise security software deployed across your business systems. This will ensure that there is accountability for every file-sharing activity that goes around in your business and can deter insecure practices to a great extent.

6.Conduct periodic security audits

It is important to review your organization’s data and information flow system on a regular basis to keep track of incidents that are dangerous to maintaining the integrity of sensitive information. Check back on channels and workflows that have reported data breaches in the past due to file-sharing activities and see that these scenarios were never repeated and security policies are strictly followed. All relevant metrics related to data flowing throughout the organization need to be reviewed periodically to identify any unusual outflow of data through any channel. Such a practice will deter any attempt to deliberately misuse organizational data and ultimately avoid repercussions from the customer’s side.

While the above tips can empower your workforce to seamlessly and securely facilitate file transfer activities within your enterprise, having a holistic cloud-based enterprise content and information management system can eliminate these risks to a great extent. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer for your business’s digital ambitions. With integrated security, powerful information access controls, and seamless content management, your data stays secure with InfinCE, while you deliver results for your customers. Get in touch with us to know more.

War: Should you go with AWS or Azure to build your apps?

Recently, businesses are in a frenzy to spruce up their technology capabilities to venture into new digital offerings that today’s consumers are increasingly demanding. The strain on traditional IT products and infrastructure has tipped its saturation point with extensive demand for unlimited scaling capacity and robustness. This has led to several innovative development paradigms that shift the technology load from in-house teams and infrastructure to ready-to-deploy offerings in the cloud. One such initiative is a serverless architecture for developing technology offerings. In simple terms, this architecture uses a cloud-enabled system as the underlying server for all technology development. There is still a server in the picture, but companies do not have to endure the pain to develop and maintain it. They only need to pay for what they use of the server.

Related Reading: 5 Advantages of Adopting a Cloud-Native Technology Infrastructure

The biggest advantage of going for a serverless architecture for application development is the speed and scalability it offers to engineers to build enterprise management systems as opposed to the traditional software development models, where it takes a long time to develop enterprise applications. Moreover, using a cloud-based server gives you geo-location-based advantages of faster user experience and lowered cost of operations and remaining compliant to regulatory authorities with regards to data security policies in a new market. 

Now that the competitive advantage of utilizing a serverless architecture for application development is explained, it is time to pick a platform to build your own. There are several leading players in the market for serverless computing but the biggest battles are often fought between Amazon and Microsoft with their “Lambda” and “Azure Functions” offerings respectively. So how do you pick a winner from these two titans? For a realistic evaluation, let us have a look at how these two offerings fare with the 3 most vital parameters of a serverless architecture namely:

• Developer Support
• Performance
• Cost

Let’s examine each in detail to see who comes out on top in becoming the preferred choice for serverless architecture-based development.

Developer Support

This is an area that your technical workforce will be more concerned about. Both these platforms offer support for a wide variety of programming languages even though Azure has more focus on Microsoft’s own line-up of programming languages in addition to JavaScript, PHP, Python, and languages compiled along with it. AWS, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive language support capability that includes Java, Python, Microsoft’s own language families, PHP, and much more. 

Being in a state of continuous evolution, both providers will add support to newer programming languages in the future and the slight advantage that AWS has here may wear off over time or remain just marginally above Azure. As for support from the providers with tips and guidance in developing applications using the varying technology, languages, both these providers offer world-class experiences with very little space to tilt the balance in either’s a favor.

Related Reading: 5 Expert Tips for Effective Cloud Migration

Performance

Large enterprise application suites, when developed on a cloud-based serverless architecture call for high performance in terms of concurrent executions of functions in batch. When we look at the official figures obtained as of the date when this blog was published, Azure offers unlimited executions concurrently but restricts the time for a single function to just 5 minutes and for 10 minutes for an extra cost. AWS, on the other hand, restricts concurrent execution to 1000 functions but offers a significantly higher execution time of 15 minutes for each function. Translating these into business-specific performance terms, we are looking at two providers basically offering an ideal performance guarantee for enterprise applications. If one offers more handling capacity for functions the other offers more execution capacity for each function. Businesses need both these on a balanced scale in the long run as technology deployments often need to perform in a mixed pattern during peak seasons and off-seasons.

Cost

No matter how advanced a digital solution or technology innovation may seem to be, the ultimate choice for a business to investing in any technology will see a major influence coming from the pricing side of the solution. Serverless architecture for application development is no exception in this regard. The inherent benefit of Pay-As-You-Go of cloud computing applies to providers in the serverless computing space as well. Both AWS and Azure, offer subscription-based pay per request plans for businesses that want to utilize their storage and computing environments to build applications on the go. As indicated by their official pricing handles today, AWS and Azure, offer almost identical pricing models pegged at an average of around USD 0.000016 per GB second after their respective free-tier usage has been exhausted. AWS offers a marginally lower cost of USD 0.00001667 per GB second, but in heavier loads, Azure compensates this margin with slightly lower prices. Both bill memory and storage as bundled with the usage which makes either of them way more affordable than Google’s offering where memory and storage are billed separately after requests are billed at an almost identical rate as these two.  

It is hard to offer a solid conclusion of who wins this battle of serverless computing providers as the differences are very marginal. Ideally, everything boils down to which development environment an organization feels more comfortable to use. Either way, if your core business is not technology development, it is advisable to trust a reliable cloud partner to help build your technology ecosystem on the cloud utilizing the best practices of cloud deployment which includes serverless architecture. This is where enterprises can trust reliable cloud platforms like InfinCE to build world-class enterprise applications in a cost-effective way. Get in touch with us to know more.

5 Advantages of Adopting a Cloud-Native Technology Infrastructure

The number of enterprise applications that run on cloud is so big now that it is wiser to refer to the cloud as a way of doing IT rather than labeling it as an IT innovation. Today, the concept of cloud native applications is a mainstay and the new normal. For those who are not acquainted with the term, a cloud-native application in its simplest form implies an enterprise application that has been designed and developed specifically to run on cloud infrastructure.

It means that cloud-native application development is rooted in containers, microservices, and dynamic orchestration. The paradigm shift from costly on-premise technology infrastructure to on-demand subscription-based service availability has found takers from all business domains and includes all magnitude of enterprises ranging from multinational corporations to small and medium businesses. In fact, research firm Gartner estimates that today over 80% of all internally developed software enterprises are cloud-native. So why is there a growing affinity for cloud-based technology deployments? Here are some key benefits you would experience with a cloud-native strategy for your technology stack:

1. Cost Efficiency

Tougher market competition and dynamic consumer needs require you to constantly upgrade and evolve your business’s technology infrastructure to roll-out new services and offerings through digital channels. Configuring or re-engineering on-premise enterprise applications that handle various aspects of your business will involve heavy costs and time which will eat into your overall IT budgets.

The market dynamics change so fast that you may need to alter or roll back new features on your consumer-facing digital channels as soon as they get launched, in order to make way for newer or modified ones. When IT expenses go overboard, it will impact your profit margins significantly, leaving you with the minimal financial muscle to invest in your core business. With cloud native applications, upgrades, as well as dynamic changes to software, can be easily handled. By configuring changes incrementally to the cloud application, it can be quickly made available to end-users at considerably lower costs.

Related Reading: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest?

2. Flexibility and Scalability

As with any cloud-based software deployment, you get the benefit of scale on-demand with a cloud native application strategy. When your business starts out from the root stage, you may not need massive amounts of storage or computing power to run various digital customer channels and as time passes, this requirement may vary depending on growth factors. This is where the scale on-demand capability of the cloud will be very attractive. You need not maintain physical storage or computing hardware regularly to scale up your technology back end when demand spikes occur. Everything would be easily managed on the cloud and business owners can focus on ideas and initiatives to expand their customer service while the technology silently scales up behind the curtains to ensure there is no disruption.

3. High Availability

For any digital-friendly initiative that a business wants to propagate to engage with their customers, a key necessity is the constant availability of the back end digital applications that make this experience possible. If the technology has been built with an on-premise model of operation, then not only does a business need to ensure the application’s resilience, it also needs to ensure that the supporting hosting and maintenance infrastructure is robust to empower continuous business without disruption.

With a cloud native architecture for your business applications, this disruption-free availability is a guaranteed benefit. Leading cloud service providers offer uninterrupted availability of the hosting environment with limitless expansion flexibility to accommodate sudden spikes of transactions or business growth. This gives business owners one less major technology paradigm to worry about. Additionally, there is 24 X 7 support from cloud vendors to assure that any challenge is mitigated seamlessly without causing any disruptions to your business operations.

4. Increased Efficiency

With a cloud native application architecture, it is quite easy for enterprises to automate a large number of tasks involved in the operation and deployment of their digital infrastructure. By building components within an application as microservices, it is easy for scaling, modifying and upgrading specific features or modules within the application without having to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. Besides, cloud native applications are inherently extensible through APIs that enable them to be integrated seamlessly with other reporting and analytical tools for deriving insights that can be used for better decision making by enterprises.

5. Secure Data Management

While it has been proven beyond doubt that public cloud environments offer nearly unbreakable security for your business data, several decision-makers do not want to move their core data systems to public cloud infrastructure for fear of security threats. By creating cloud-native enterprise applications, you get to manage your data on your own private cloud infrastructure and ship data to and from various systems in your own cloud environment. While storage and expansive flexibility can be availed from leading cloud providers, you have control over your entire application landscape wherein your own security policies and protocols can be implemented in addition to the standard procedures followed by these vendors.

The unparalleled benefits offered by a cloud-native application strategy is a boon to businesses that want to engage with the digital-savvy consumer base of today. From handling their internal operations to building customer-facing digital channels, businesses can rely on enterprise cloud service providers like InfinCE to deliver a robust and secure environment to build and deploy applications. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can help transform your business’s technology into a truly cloud-native one.

Why Is The Public Cloud A Better Digital Transformation Option?

A decade ago, only a fraction of large scale enterprise applications, as well as consumer-facing applications, were in the cloud. Today, everything, from video and music streaming services to enterprise systems like ERP resides on cloud-based platforms. The large scale disruption that occurred due to the widespread adoption of cloud computing was the transition of one-time expensive licenses for software into highly affordable and flexible usage.

The benefits do not end with just cost but also the improved scalability that organizations were able to enjoy when their business or transaction volumes fluctuated during peak and non-peak market conditions. This is precisely the reason why the enterprise SaaS market is generating revenues of over $20 billion in a quarter for software vendors with a 32% year on growth. Industrial sectors ranging from banking to healthcare, retail, utilities, public services, and manufacturing have all made massive strides in cloud technology adoption. In fact, studies have shown that one-third of all IT budgets from enterprises now go into cloud solutions and platforms.

So cloud computing is here to stay and grow. The question now is what type of cloud, enterprises should invest in to ensure that their digital aspirations are offered the most compatible and progressive growth platforms. The major cloud options available for enterprises are public and private cloud systems. So what exactly are these? Here’s a brief explanation:

Private Cloud

A private cloud system is one that resides purely within an enterprise IT infrastructure and managed comprehensively by their own in-house technical team. From the deployment of applications to maintenance and upgrades, every activity that happens on such a cloud environment is owned, controlled and managed privately by the enterprise themselves. In short, the enterprise builds its own controlled cloud environment for internal usage and restricts any external access.

Public Cloud

A public cloud system is one in which your data and or applications reside on a cloud platform provided by reputed cloud vendors. The vendor is responsible for managing the data center requirements such as storage, application development support, processing and computing power, security and other infrastructural requirements.

So how can enterprises decide on choosing what’s best for their business? Let us examine the top 5 parameters every enterprise must evaluate before selecting their cloud infrastructure and how public and private cloud systems fare in each of these parameters.

1. Security

Every modern-day organization has to deal with truckloads of data that needs to be processed for decision making across different departments. When this entire process is transitioned into cloud-based systems where data is communicated over the internet, then security is a key concern. If an organization were to build their own private cloud infrastructure, then they would have to invest heavily on fortifying their cloud environment from threats. They could argue that external threats are lower than in the case of public cloud systems, but the effort involved in deploying and managing security protocols especially physical security of data centers is humongous.

Besides the right knowledge on how to thwart different levels of threats that arise in the industry from time to time will be limited if you engage internal staff to handle these security issues. As for a public cloud system, they would be aware of how to manage and neutralize the latest threats in the industry. In addition to that, the advantage of dedicated physically secure data centers, public cloud systems offer cloud infrastructure in your desired level of security preferences.

2. Technical Workforce Requirement

If your core business is non-IT, then the number of staff required to maintain a private enterprise cloud ecosystem within your business would be considerably larger if your business deals with a sizeable volume of IT transactions. This workforce requirement spans across different categories of IT technical staff like network administrators, physical and cyber security experts, database management teams, application maintenance and environment support teams, etc. Having a large dedicated IT workforce would result in significantly higher manpower requirements for a non-revenue, operational stream within your business and hence could impact staffing requirements across other key functions gradually due to budget constraints.

Additionally, your in-house technical team may not have access to industry awareness sessions and workshops that dedicated public cloud service providers offer to their staff. Hence, they would not be in a position to handle complexities that may arise from time to time. Public cloud service providers, on the other hand, invest in R&D, training and learning sessions to keep their workforce aware of what’s new and innovative in their industry. By preferring them over your own private cloud infrastructure, the knowledgeable workforce requirement challenge is mitigated considerably.

3. Scalable Infrastructure

Today’s businesses need a flexible technology infrastructure that can handle large fluctuations in their consumer demands and market conditions. For example, if you are an online retailer, then your technology backend will witness massive loads during the holiday shopping season and hence may need to scale up bandwidth, storage, computing, and analytical power, during this season. If you have private cloud infrastructure, then scalability will not be a flexible advantage since it would involve upgrading your own hardware infrastructure as well as other platform strengths to handle surges in usage.

Maintaining this high level of operational infrastructure all through the year is an expensive affair since the surge may be restricted to just a few months, but the hardware maintenance needs to be an ongoing activity all through the year. This is where public cloud systems offer an on-demand scalability advantage to your technology infrastructure. You can increase your cloud environment, performance, storage, and computing power in times of sudden business spikes and transit back to normal usage levels once the peak usage period is over. This will result in huge savings in terms of cost as well as management of cloud infrastructure as you only need to dynamically manage requests for increased transactions and not have the infrastructure boosted up always.

4. Ease of transitioning

Migrating your legacy on-premise system to a cloud-based platform is not a cakewalk activity. It involves careful planning, strategizing and prioritizing of business functions that need to be migrated to a cloud-based platform. If you are to building a private cloud system for everything, then the overheads involved in project management, application development, data migration, hosting and ultimately the availability of the system for consumer-facing business operations will be a challenging one.

If you opt for ready to deploy public cloud systems on the other hand, then all it takes is your data to migrate into the new cloud ecosystem after a small personalization or customization exercise. Or if you want to transition your proprietary enterprise applications in a cloud environment, then again the stability and support offered by public clouds can in no way be matched if you were to build a private cloud ecosystem to facilitate the transition.

5. Cost of Operations

The cost factor is a culmination of all the above parameters mentioned in this blog. As you can witness clearly, a private cloud requires quite a big investment to ensure that the organization’s technology infrastructure is on a secure and scalable cloud ecosystem with skilled and technically competent staff. This investment is not a one-time activity because technology evolves over time and you need to constantly transform with the changing technologies. With a public cloud system, you only incur the subscription cost while all other management and periodic feature upgrades are intelligently handled by the vendors themselves without passing on a heavy cost to users. This would mean that your organization would be able to significantly lower IT investments and hence core business operations would receive a higher budget allocation.

Related Reading: Migrate to the cloud efficiently! Check out our free guide to enable effective cloud transformation.

Thus, a public cloud system is the most feasible solution for enterprises to transit their digital assets into a cloud ecosystem. As more and more technology vendors bring newer innovations in the form of cloud-based ready to deploy platforms, it becomes easier for businesses to concentrate more on their core operational matters and less on their IT investments. With an infinite cloud platform like INFINCE, transform your business into a truly digital enterprise. Get in touch with us now!

CRM systems have come a long way from their origins as contact management systems for storing and retrieving contact information. Enterprises across-the-board now regard it as a valuable and indispensable tool to not just manage and improve relationships with contacts but to manage the entire gamut of customer relationship management.

The nature of CRM has also witnessed a tectonic shift. Cloud-based CRM now dominates with 87% of the total market share, a big jump from just 12% in 2007. The overwhelming preference for cloud-based CRM is for good reasons.

1. The Cloud Facilitates Big Savings in Cost and Effort

On-premises CRM entails huge upfront investment in hardware and servers. The cloud CRM vendor absorbs such investment and offers a pay-as-you-go payment model for clients. Businesses pay only a monthly charge, converting their capital-expense (CAPEX) costs into an easy attributable operational expense (OPEX.) Still better, the CRM becomes easily scalable, with the ability to add capacity easily as and when required, and scale-down during downtime.

The spillover monetary benefits of hosting CRM in the cloud includes hassle-free maintenance, no troubleshooting, and freedom from having to upgrade the CRM periodically. These tasks are done by the vendor, and the enterprise can, in fact, do without single IT personnel in-house.

Cloud-based systems are quick and painless to deploy as well. The set-up is as simple as paying the subscription fees and logging in. Cloud-based CRM systems tend to prioritize ease of use and accessibility, meaning easier learning curve for end users and lesser training costs for enterprises.

2. Cloud Enables Anytime, Anywhere Access

The biggest advantage of cloud-based CRM is anytime, anywhere access. The data and the software reside in the cloud, and accessible through convenient mobile apps or other front end software, without constraints of geography or time. The ability to access the CRM through intuitive mobile apps is arguably the single biggest benefit of cloud-based CRM considering 65% of employees achieve their sales quota when using mobile CRM, and only 22% of employees achieve their sales quota when mobile CRM isn’t used.

The anytime anywhere access make cloud hosted CRM ideal for today’s fast-paced and highly competitive world, where opportunities exist only for a short while and have to be seized at the instant. Opportunities come knocking rarely. With a cloud-based CRM ready, the executive is ready to seize the opportunity by having all information and resources in his smartphone, regardless of whether he is at the airport, a spa, a business meeting or out for lunch.

3. Cloud Brings Integrated Data Management

A cloud-based CRM not just centralizes data in one place, but is also handy to integrate information from external, disparate sources, such as media activity, project management information, accounting information, and more. Dedicated cloud integration tools facilitate the seamless sharing of data from disparate sources.

The integrated and consolidated processing of information prevents gaps in information or understanding when dealing with a customer across multiple touch points. Marketers and other users have access to real-time or latest data, synced from the cloud server whenever online.

4. Cloud-Based CRM is Always Updated

Upgrading on-premises CRM is a hassle, requiring modification of the code, and provisioning everything again. With a cloud-based CRM, the vendor takes up the task. The vendor is more likely to upgrade the CRM and co-opt new features very fast, to pre-empt losing customers to competitor products. Cloud-based CRM vendors are also more likely to innovate, to offer better features and functionality, to differentiate themselves from competitors.

5. Cloud CRM Facilitates Seamless Collaboration

A cloud-based CRM doubles up as an effective collaboration tool, offering remote and off-site employees a reliable and robust medium to connect and collaborate with their team and customers alike. The Cloud CRM offers a common interface enabling team members to share data and updates that contribute to the end objective of increasing sales and customer satisfaction. International teams especially can collaborate effectively across time-zones.

6. Cloud Offers Robust Security More Often Than Not

Security is the literally the million dollar question staring at enterprises in the wake of heightened security breaches. A 2018 study by Juniper Research estimates cybercriminals to steal an estimated 33 billion records in 2023, up from an already whopping 12 billion records in 2018.

Contrary to perception, the cloud is more secure than on-premises systems. Any decent cloud-based CRM offers robust security, free from the usual suspects of out-of-date software. The CRM is the bread and butter rather than an appendix, the vendor is more likely to and is able to take the proper precautions, with dedicated staff looking to discovering and closing weak security points.

CRM also lessens the risk of system failure, with dedicated servers and redundant databases minimizing the risk of loss of data or downtime. Businesses have the flexibility to negotiate an SLA service-level agreement with an agreed upon level of service, including the acceptable “downtime,” beyond which compensation sets in.

While the cloud-based CRM offers several advantages, it is by no means a magic wand to success. Success depends on the skillful implementation, overcoming challenges such as retaining control of data, effective collaboration with the vendor’s support system and provisioning adequate bandwidth to access the cloud seamlessly. With INFINCE make it all possible. Call us today to learn how INFINCE can help you battle business challenges with infinite cloud.

The cloud offers a host of benefits in terms of cost-savings, speed, efficiency, improvements, and more. However, unless the migration is done right, much of the benefits of the cloud do not realize, and worse, the disruption may make the enterprise dysfunctional without anything to gain in return.

5 Expert Tips for Effective Cloud Migration

To help you empower the best of cloud, here’s a checklist for efficient cloud migration.

1. Determine the Reasons for Migration

Migration to the cloud because everyone else is doing is an exercise doomed to failure. Identify a pressing need for migrating to the cloud, or specifically be clear of the gains to be achieved through migration. The benefits could be process efficiency, cost savings, ability to serve customers better, ability to operate from a wider geographical footprint, or anything else.

Perform an objective SWOT analysis of the possible benefits, disadvantages, opportunities, and threats, of the specific asset migration, before committing to the exercise. Migrating to the cloud entails a lot of investment in time and resources, would also cause a disruption to the entrenched ecosystem of the company, and force a learning curve on the employees. Unless the benefits, at least in the long run, outweigh the investment, the enterprise is better off with the status quo.

2. Assess the Environment

Having committed to the migration, decide on the specific applications to be migrated. Not all processes benefit from migrating to the cloud, and many legacy apps or software is best left on the on-premises servers. For instance, it may not be a wise decision to migrate or replace a performance-intensive legacy app that works fine.

Having identified the apps to be migrated to the cloud, analyze the infrastructure used by such apps, in terms of the storage consumed, the data generated, the resources required for Big Data analytics, and so on. Provision for any required enhancements. Next, identify a suitable cloud environment with compatible resources, and determine the architecture needed for the migration.

Migration may be shallow cloud or deep cloud. Shallow cloud integration, also known as “lift-and-shift” entails moving the on-premise application to the cloud, with little or no changes except whatever is required to run the applications in the new environment. Deep cloud integration entails modification of the application during the migration process to leverage key cloud capabilities such as auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing.

Another consideration is opting for a simple, single provider or for a multi-cloud approach. The latter approach, more commonplace, involves splitting applications over multiple cloud providers or developing in a cloud-agnostic approach.

Many enterprises underestimate the migration costs. Costs vary considerably, depending on the nature of the applications being migrated. For instance, costs for applications that constantly run vary greatly from costs for applications that spin up and spin down upon completion of the job. For example, in AWS On-Demand instances, subscribers pay for computing capacity by per hour or per second, depending on the instances run.

There is also the option or private cloud and public clouds. Public clouds keep costs low, but may offer only limited levels of latency and security.

3. Select the right cloud provider

Identifying a migration architect responsible for planning and completing all aspects of the migration, and taking all decisions and a technical plan is essential and should be one of the earliest decisions after committing to migration.

In most cases, it becomes essential to rope in an external partner who has specialized experience in cloud migration. Make sure the selected partner is capable of meeting the architectural requirement, has redundant servers to ensure near 100% uptime, and offers flexible plans to scale-up and scale-down resources on demand. Pay special attention to the SLA and the support capabilities of the selected provider.

4. Execute the Migration

The cloud migration process culminates with the actual migration of resources from the legacy on-premises legacy server to the new cloud server.

Chalk out a migration plan, which details the timeline and methodology of the actual file transfer. The key steps in the migration plan are:

• Lay down the order of migration of application and data.
• Schedule the time of migration, while causing minimal disruption to company operations. Schedule the migration during the night, or when operations are at a lull.
• Back up the data on existing servers, and make sure the backup is easily retrievable if the need arises.
• Set up the cloud environment. Provision the cloud servers and connections and test all the individual components.
• Finally, transfer the data.  Enterprises have the option of making the actual switch all at once or move a few customers at a time. Migrating the first data load will invariably take some time.

Post-transfer, test all the connection again fully and ensure the system is up and running. Make sure all the migrated data is present and available, and the environment is secure.

The migration process may not be entirely smooth and straightforward. Several potential issues, both anticipated and unanticipated, could emerge as roadblocks. Take all possible precautions to counter such eventualities, and be ready to make impromptu changes and tackle any unexpected issue that emerges head-on. An open line of communication with the customer support team of the selected cloud partner helps.

5. Monitor the New Environment

The migration process does not end with the transfer of files. Issues may flare up in the cloud environment as the apps are used, and as such it is important to set up a dedicated monitoring system for a while, to identify and fix any potential issues.

Migration to the cloud may force some changes to end-user processes. Employees may have to be trained on the new method and a slowdown taken cognizance of during the learning curve. Any changes to customer-facing processes may have to be explained through blogs, emails or other documentation.

Another important post-migration consideration is resource optimization. The cloud is optimized for dynamic resource allocation, and as such, plan for distributing resources to applications rather than continue with allocating resources statically.

The above steps are only indicative. Each enterprise is unique, and the best approach to migration depends on the company’s infrastructure, environment, incumbent procedures, and future requirements. To experience a smooth transition with cloud, sign up with INFINCE today!