Revealed: 5 Brilliant Ways The Cloud Can Help Your Business
The aim of running a successful business is to: a) offer products and services that your target market wants and b) run your daily operations as efficiently as possible. There’s no denying that millions of entrepreneurs have been successful in doing that across the globe.
But, some aspiring entrepreneurs may find that they’re struggling with certain aspects of their businesses. If you’re in a similar predicament, you might not know it, but “the cloud” could help you streamline your operations and offer a more efficient service.
What is The Cloud?
In a nutshell, the cloud is a term that describes software or a service that runs online and gets hosted in remote data servers. Examples of cloud services include email, data storage, database hosting, and even web hosting.
With that in mind, how could the cloud help your business and make it more manageable and less stressful to run? Take a look at these five brilliant ways for some inspiration:
1. Email
Many companies still host their email systems in-house. The trouble with that approach is remote access by employees can be challenging. Plus, if a company’s email server goes down, all staff can’t send or receive messages, especially to and from customers.
Cloud-hosted email platforms such as Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 are accessible from anywhere and at any time. Each server runs seamlessly, and backup servers mirror them. If the primary email server goes offline, a backup one takes over immediately.
2. Human Resources (HR)
One of the aspects of running a successful business is managing its most valuable assets: the people that work within it. There are various facets to consider, such as hiring, payroll, employee disputes, reviews, and so on.
It makes sense to invest in cloud HR software so your human resources department can manage all aspects of its work more efficiently.
3. Telephone Systems
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got five employees or 50,000 in your business. Your company will doubtless need a reliable and scalable telephone system to enable communication with each other, customers, and suppliers.
If you’re spending a fortune on maintaining an in-house telephone system, it’s time to move to the cloud. You can use VoIP cloud-based telephony technology to reduce costs, increase call clarity, and scale up your business.
4. Document Management
Are you fed up with having a “filing room” in your business filled with mountains of paperwork? If the answer’s yes, you need to take advantage of cloud-based document management systems.
You can use them to store documents online in a digital format. Plus, they enable you to digitally sign documents such as contracts and email them to your customers.
5. File Storage
Last but not least, the cloud is also an ideal, secure, and safe way of storing important files used by each department and team member. Cloud services such as Dropbox offer an array of tools for teams like versioning and revision history.
Now there’s no need to operate and maintain file servers at your physical premises!
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The cost of opening up a physical store can be great. If you’re going to do so, we highly recommend keeping these three things in mind. They’re not the most obvious costs to account for, but before your first week of business gets underway, you’ll need to see about them.