Imagine that all you need to do to start your work day is get any device with a secure connection and log in you work profile; From here you can access all files and information that an average company would have, including archived data, shared folders, CRM, SQL, Microsoft Office, business email, virtually everything. Needless to say, you don’t need to necessarily sit on your desk in your office to work anymore. You don’t even need to commute or be in the same country as your colleagues. As Nasstar, one of the leading providers of cloud computing likes to say, you can start working outside the box.
If you work in IT, there’s even more good news – cloud computing puts an end to perpetual server and software maintenance and lets you focus on core projects. And for managers – cloud computing and software-as-a-service especially provides an alternative with clear cut benefits. Let’s explore them.
There are different dimensions to cloud computing. Software as a Service – provides storage, processing power, and applications on demand. It offers SMBs an enterprise level of service up until now inaccessible and very, very expensive. It is the model that is most likely to affect our working styles but also change the way businesses manage their IT significantly. Gartner predicts that by 2013 there will be 49 million of us using Hosted Desktop – the manner in which Software, applications and storage are delivered on demand to businesses, as a service.
It takes only hours to deploy all your data to the cloud and start taking advantage of the benefits Hosted Desktop can offer. All company applications, business email, Office suite, virtually everything you use at work, sits on a secure Data Centre in the Cloud, where it’s backed up daily and taken care of, thus providing a real disaster recovery solution for businesses. Since this is a subscription service you can upscale and downscale with the demands of your business – you only pay for what you use and users can be easily added and deleted. This is flexibility that the traditional model can never deliver. The fact that you won’t need to maintain in house servers and software anymore automatically translates into valuable savings. There is no need for perpetual software licences anymore and Nasstar, the innovative Hosted Desktop provider, offers the latest – Windows 7 theme and Microsoft Office 2010 on demand.
Another great benefit is Standardisation – a small but very crucial step towards better productivity. Change usually takes time to be accepted and internalised by employees, but with Hosted Desktop there isn’t anything that we’re not already comfortable with. We need to log in our work profiles – something we do tens of times a day when we want to use Online banking, or Hotmail, or Facebook. Hosted Desktop works, looks and feels just like your usual desktop at work. It is very easy to use and absolutely no training is required. Perhaps the most important area that proves that savings do not need to mean reduction in quality is the level of security one gets with Hosted Desktop. For example, Nasstar has 99.9% Service Level Agreement and in the last 12 months it managed to achieve even higher standard – 99.96%. Just to compare – internally managed IT can usually deliver 99% up time- which is equal to 5,5220 minutes of down time, or a direct loss of turn over by 6.8%. Nasstar would reduce that down time by over 5,000 minutes effectively adding nearly 6.5% on to your turn over.
So the future work place for managers is one where cost of IT is transparent and predictable and services as available on demand. If IT is not your core business, that’s a huge relief because there are cloud computing providers that are much more efficient than any in house IT management team. Hosted desktop provides Simplicity, security and standardisation, which makes everything so much more manageable. The flexibility and adaptability of this model makes the business much more resistant and responsive to its environment and ultimately the optimisation of resources does not seem to be a tough task anymore.
Ultimately, cloud computing is changing the way we work irrespective of where we stay in the organisation. If we look carefully, no matter what you job is, the trend is towards achieving optimum quality. Henceforth, you, the employee of the future, will be able to do whatever it is that you do best, and IT will just be an enabler for one to shine, just as it was meant to. And once you’re out of the box – it will be much more natural to think outside of the box.
Evelina Blagoeva is on the Partner Programme team at Nasstar www.nasstar.com
