The decision whether or not to invest in technology within your organisation is a difficult one. There are many pitfalls to overcome to make the right decision that will enhance and improve your business productivity in a positive way without creating a financial loss with no real gains. In the following article we will look at some of the technologies you could adopt, along with the benefits these services could yield.
Why would I want to invest in technology for my business
If you are considering investing in a business enhancing technology, there should be good reason to do so. Making this decision really boils down to mapping your organisation’s key functions and creating an improvement to them in some way, either by increasing productivity, enhancing security, streamlining processes or any other improvement to the functions you believe to be critical to business operations. The key is to first decide what your goal is and select a technology based upon that; you should not seek a technology and then attempt to make it reach a goal!
Create cost savings with virtualisation
One route that many organisations go down is that of virtualisation. In general terms, this is the process of consolidating software and hardware into one managed service cloud. For example if you are running twenty servers with various services provided across the group, there are obvious costs associated with keeping this infrastructure live. You could virtualise this group of servers in to one piece of kit. Apart from the obvious cost savings, you could increase resilience and availability with the built-in features of virtualisation. Other than server consolidation, there are other streams to virtualisation, such as application and desktop virtualisation. All of these have benefits which could improve aspects of your organisation.
Go mobile to reach your customers
Who do you know that doesn’t own one or more mobile devices? The mobile market has grown at an astonishing rate and continues to do so. If your organisation isn’t tapping into this arena then you could be missing out significantly. If you provide your customers mobile access to your services, you will be increasing your potential to do more and more business with them. This is a key area to focus on if your business operations can support it.
How Cloud Office Services can help your business
Cloud office services are a great step towards the complete mobile workforce. This cloud based service means that no matter where your staff are, they can have access to files and applications that they need day-to-day. Working on the go and being able to access their information has always been a great benefit, but these steps towards application access (such as Word, Excel, Outlook etc…) make this mobile working solution so much more refined. If you have staff that could benefit from this way of working, cloud office services could be the way to go.
What about Cloud Printing
Taking a further step into the world of cloud services, we should also consider cloud printing. In its simplest form, this is the ability to print from any device attached to the cloud to any other printing device also part of the cloud network. This takes away the need for a client PC, with printer drivers installed, to manage the process. You can print straight to any printer from your mobile device from anywhere at all. There are obvious advantages to this for your mobile workforce and might well be something you want to consider.
Is being an early adopter of technology a cost-effective idea?
With new technologies always emerging, there is always the opportunity to take advantage of these at an early stage. Making this leap could give you an edge over your competitors and drive your business in the direction you want to take it. That said, there are other considerations too, new technologies inherently house potential teething issues, bugs, unforeseen complications and other various implementation flaws. When considering investing in a brand new technology for your business, you really need to consider the risks that any complications could have on your business.
This is just a handful of the technologies available on the market out there today. IT leaders are constantly coming up with new ideas and solutions to help you improve your organisation’s efficiency. If you want to drive your business forward in this ever demanding and increasingly fiercer world, maybe now is the time to make the leap.
