When I ran my three companies in the 1990’s, technology was a tool I had to leverage in order to be successful, but the investment was enormous for our small business. I almost went broke spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for computers and software. Today, cloud applications have brought a sea change for small business owners, who can now run a business effectively on a very small technology investment. How small businesses can invest smarter in tech:
Cloud Collaboration for increased productivity.
People are more productive when they can work together. Today’s cloud solutions like Office 365 allow on-site and remote employees to collaborate regardless of where they are located. In fact, Forrester reports many significant economic gains of using Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity and collaboration solutions. These benefits include increased mobile worker productivity, ability to avoid hardware upgrades and software costs and a reduction in third-party fees. How: Using Delve in Microsoft Office 365, it’s easy to identify the content that needs to be worked on, who is currently using it, what they’re working on, and how to contact them to discuss changes. In Microsoft OneDrive, team members are able to collaborate on documents or presentations simultaneously on any device. Microsoft SharePoint can also help teams create their own internal site just for a specific department. Skype for Business allows video “face to face” meetings including a language translator in real time for everyone on the call. One of the little-known features of Microsoft Office is Mail Tips, which eliminates embarrassing “email blunders.” With this tool, users receive informative messages flagging potential mistakes when they add recipients, reply to all, or handle confidential information.
Use big data cloud analytics to know what’s going on inside the company.
This is not just for big companies, it’s also for small businesses that want to analyze what is really going on with their employees and customers. By being able to analyze how the company is working, small business owners can make more informed decisions. How: With Microsoft Power BI, any owner can start to analyze his or her data in a few minutes. This cloud application quickly connects to existing company information wherever it lives with pre-built dashboards. It connects in real time to data in Excel and creates interactive reports. Click on any information to get details and gain further insights. Natural language query allows anyone to easily ask questions of the displayed data. Delve Analytics provides a personal dashboard that helps any team member get back lost time by analyzing their productivity. The tool uses four key categories to visually display how that person is spending their work time. Any user can also learn how others consume their emails based on the read rate, responses, and forwards.
Protect your business and customers with cloud security and disaster recovery.
According to an IBM study, almost four million businesses are attacked each year. One of the most popular places to hack are ill-prepared small businesses. The average cost of an attack is $188,000. How: The most vulnerable points of entry to your company’s data are your own employees. Office 365 protects the company by alerting users if they click on a potentially malicious link in an email. While surfing the web, Office 365’s Advanced Threat Protection’s Safe Links feature shows a warning screen or blocks users before going to the website. More importantly, this cloud application gives critical insight into who is getting targeted in any organization, the types of attacks, and investigates messages that have been blocked due to an unknown virus or malware. While team members are surfing the web, Microsoft Edge’s Windows Defender Application Guard can protect them in a similar ways.
What new ways is your business leveraging the cloud for a competitive advantage?
This article is sponsored by Microsoft.
