Is Moving Systems to the Cloud Critical to Your Company’s Survival?
Successful companies have been moving their operations into digital systems for some time now. Innovation in managing sales, manufacturing, human resources, and financials with digital systems have enabled industry leading companies to enjoy greater levels of growth and market dominance. In addition, generational changes in the employee population have brought digital natives into the workforce so that millennials and Gen Z now account for over 50% of the workforce.
COVID-19 Turns a Five Year Trend into an Eighteen Month Emergency
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has compressed the digital enablement trend from years into months. Successful organizations of all sizes have rushed to push their operations off their on-premise servers and into the cloud to accommodate the changes that have taken place as a result of the pandemic. Employers and employees alike have had to adapt to the requirements of a distributed work environment. Meetings, training, time and attendance tracking, employee communication – all this and more have moved to the cloud.
Will the Move to the Cloud Be Critical to Survival?
In a word, yes. This accelerated move to the cloud shows no signs of slowing down once the pandemic is under control. Cloud based digital systems will be the ‘new normal’. For companies to survive they must consider how quickly they can move their operations into the cloud.
Upcoming Live Webinar:How Cloud Hosting Can Help Your Company
Survive Now
Date: February 10
Can You Trust Your On-Premise Servers?
With over 8,000 customers in North America and the Caribbean, we at Net at Work have had ample opportunity to observe and assist our clients when disaster has struck. Imagine how easily one of these scenarios could happen to your organization. The descriptions have been altered to protect our clients’ reputation.
- A non-profit experienced a fire in the building that housed the central office. All servers and workstations on premise were destroyed except for a single laptop.
- Construction at an adjacent site to a manufacturing client’s place of business caused their server room to be flooded, losing both their financial system servers and backup servers.
- Ransomware infected a construction client’s system requiring every workstation and server to be replaced and backups retrieved by courier from their external backup site. Payroll deadlines were nearly missed, and the company had to consider handing out estimated physical checks to over 400 employees in dozens of locations.
- A health care services client realized that they had failed to properly pay their employees and needed to restore data from a previous quarter. Backups taken offsite were retrieved but failed to restore properly; no one in IT had ever tested them. Payroll staff had to spend weeks reentering the information by hand from paper reports.
- A fast food franchiser was visited by the Department of Labor auditors. When the inspectors asked for data concerning injuries for the past 10 years, HR learned that the older data had been stored on a server that had been decommissioned and taken offline. The company faced penalties for failure to show reporting compliance.
Could a Cloud-based System Have Helped?
Cloud systems like Cloud at Work have the resources and expertise to address the common issues faced by on-premise server users.
- Built-in redundant servers so that customers are never reliant on a single server location.
- Backups are continuous and tested.
- Storage capacity is never an issue with cloud systems.
- Server maintenance (security patches, operating system updates and the like) is automatic and does not interfere with day-to-day business operations.
- Experts are running the systems. Cloud systems constantly test their system for vulnerabilities and focus on protecting their client’s data. It is their only job, not one of many as it is for an on-premise IT team.
In each of our clients’ cases, if they had been running their systems in the cloud, they could have responded more quickly when disasters struck – or avoided the disaster all together. All the while enjoying the peace of mind that their data was safe and accessible from wherever they were.
Cloud at Work is More Than Technology
Cloud at Work is one of many elements of the Net at Work ecosystem. As such, Net at Work provides our clients with expertise and experience across the digital landscape. For Cloud at Work users, that means that all our practices work together without finger pointing. We optimize and build on the relationships we already have with our clients as their trusted advisors in the areas of financials, document management, digital marketing, employer solutions and many other areas. Together we provide system integration across all parts of a company’s business.
What Can You Do to Help Your Company Survive?
To learn more about how cloud-based systems can help your company to unleash its potential, attend our webinar How Cloud Hosting Can Help Your Company Survive Now on Wednesday, February 10 at 1 PM EST.
In the meantime, plan to meet with your trusted advisor from Net at Work to learn more about the advantages of Cloud at Work.
