Lockdown 3.0 How’s it going?

With working from home back as a way of life for most of us, we just wanted to check in and ask how it’s going. What do you need to change to help your colleagues work effectively and securely away from the office?

Keep your applications and data safe and accessible from anywhere. 

 

When we think about working from home, straight away many of us visualise days packed with Teams or Zoom calls. Remote working is more than this. It’s about accessing critical applications and data from anywhere. Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, helps move IT infrastructure like servers and software to the cloud so that your people can work safely from home just as if they were in the office. There are other benefits too. Your office-based systems become more efficient, more reliable, and more protected against cyber-attack – something that has risen over 30% since May 2020.  

Move your IT services to the cloud. 

Don’t miss business calls. Using Teams doesn’t mean you’ve brought your office phone home. 

 

You might think that because your business is using Teams, Zoom, or Slack that your telephony is all sorted. Sadly, it almost certainly isn’t. These systems are great for collaboration and home working, but they don’t come with business telephony pre-installed. People within your organisation can call each other but they can’t dial out. Don’t believe us? Open your Teams app and click on the calls icon. If you don’t see a Dialpad then you can’t call external numbers like customers and they can’t call you.   

Bring your office phone home.  

With everyone at home, sharing connectivity is causing problems. Free up your workers! 

 

Four in ten businesses continue to suffer because of difficulties with network connectivity and sharing broadband capacity with other people locked down at home. Unreliable connections mean unreliable business. With lockdown set to last until spring, canny business leaders are investing in dedicated connections to the corporate network to protect essential services to customers and safeguard against data theft and cybercrime.  

Assure access to your corporate network.  

Do your homework. Find out more.

Moving your IT and telephony to the cloud makes sense. As does making sure your colleagues can access systems reliably with appropriate, secure, network connections. That said, we understand that these decisions need thinking through. Here is some more advice to help you.

Microsoft Cloud – Azure

 

‘The cloud’ refers to the use of IT services hosted on the Internet, rather than on servers at a company’s premises. Today hardware, software, networks, platforms, and data storage can all be managed in the cloud and provided as a service. Cloud services are powerful and highly flexible; pricing, for example, is typically based on monthly usage. There is also a lot of choice of cloud providers. Many mid-sized enterprises choose Microsoft’s Azure because it excels at cybersecurity and hybrid cloud, which is basically a fancy term for being able to flexibly integrate office-based servers with cloud-based ones. This is important because what you put in the cloud and when will affect the benefits your business wins.
Businesses that have embraced cloud solutions find they can do more things, more quickly and manage their budgets more effectively. Cloud solutions are worth serious consideration, particularly for growing and medium-sized businesses.

Benefits of moving to the cloud

 

  • Improved business agility – it becomes easier and quicker to scale services based on demand, add new software and improve the accessibility and availability of data, services and systems to support remote working.
  • Operational simplification – less physical computing resources on premises reduces the overheads associated with administering onsite technology and makes the process of upgrading to the latest technology a whole lot easier.
  • Financial savings – costs can be managed more effectively, capital expenditure reduced, and cash freed up to invest in business priorities.
  • Greater reliability – modern enterprise-grade cloud technologies reduce the risks associated with system failures across disks, servers and networks while bringing additional resilience to security and backups.

Microsoft Business Telephony

 

Microsoft Teams is an extremely powerful cloud-based application which seamlessly enables collaboration across your organisation. It is also included as standard in the Microsoft 365 subscription. Lockdown has seen global Teams subscriptions rocket from 44 million to over 115 million in just 6 months. It has become the mainstay communications hub of enterprises, organisations, and consumers alike. Businesses are opting for Teams over other collaboration apps because of Microsoft’s focus on cybersecurity protection. However, most businesses don’t realise that Teams is not supplied with the ability to make external calls. This means, without specific integration, your office numbers are not connected to, or available from, Teams. The remedy is straightforward. Your IT partner can supply you with a Business Voice licence that works with Teams and a service called Direct Routing that connects your office numbers to the telephone networks straight from the Teams app on your desktop.

Better network connections

 

Networks have changed the way we work. They now enable businesses to collaborate better, access information anywhere, work more flexibly and be far more productive. The quality of experience delivered to users and customers depends on the performance of the networks that connect all the company’s other IT. The downside of this reliance on networks is that, if they fail, there’s a risk of reputational damage, as consumers begin to doubt the reliability of service and even the organisation’s ability to protect their personal data. So, safeguarding connectivity is a business priority. And the value of good network design and management has never been more important.
Although you can handle networks in-house, providing reliable and secure connectivity for remote workers is much more complex. A managed service provider will have the skills you need to design and implement the right solution for you. For example, you may need to use a blend of managed broadband, Wi-Fi, virtual private networking, or possibly software-defined networks in order to provide an efficient, cost-effective and secure connection for remote workers into the corporate network.

What’s next?

Overall, many businesses have being struggling with the impact of variable connectivity performance, safeguarding against data theft, and being confident that people working from home have effective environments in which to do their jobs. If these challenges are affecting your organisation, then you might like to join our expert panel sessions where you will be able to find out how other companies are overcoming these problems and what the experts think.  

Sessions will cover security, cloud, automation, and how to get your IT strategy right for your business. Follow us on LinkedIn to receive details of what’s happening when.  

Follow us on LinkedIn

Further Information

Be more productive with
brilliantly managed IT

TALK TO US | 0844 560 0202
CONTACT US

Related Articles