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The globalized economy means businesses need more efficient ways to keep your team connected to best respond to lightning quick changes, keep everyone up-to-date with their roles on the team or to just make collaboration convenient regardless of where staff is located.
Here are five ‘must use’ technologies that will keep your staff connected, increase your competitiveness and cut costs in an increasingly difficult business environment.
1) Virtual Private Networks
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is an effective solution to benefit from long-distance or secured network connections. Compared to other technologies, VPNs offer impressive benefits for wireless local area networking — providing a low-cost way for remote-based staff to be as productive as your onsite team.
A VPN gives two major advantages: cost savings, and limitless network scalability. On the client side; accessing a VPN network will bring benefits in ease of use, and immediate access to sensitive information that shouldn’t be broadcast over the public internet.
2) Smartphones
Smartphones help businesses improve connectivity by providing staff easy access to information and critical data regardless of where they’re working. Providing employees like service engineers, sales reps or even drivers with business phones lets them quickly access critical information and communicate with managers, improving both productivity and efficiency.
Smartphones will also improve the quality of service your team provides to customers by enabling them to effortlessly keep in contact with each other. Increasingly, mobile devices are the future of how people will both work and communicate.
3) Softphones
A softphone is a software based telephone that functions on a particular operating system. Softphone solutions can use either a conventional phone line or Voice over Internet Protocol to establish low-cost (or free) communication between parties.
Unlike many exclusively VoIP-based phones; softphones don’t require hardware but instead reside as software on an internet connected device.
Relying on a softphone app for inexpensive worldwide communication and to cut the cost of typical mobile calls means you need fast, reliable and available Wi-Fi access from the best possible 4G LTE network; currently T-Mobile is on track to have some of the most comprehensive 4G coverage in the U.S. and is leading the way to the next step: 5G.
4) The Cloud
Cloud computing removes the need for expensive (and failure prone) hardware by shifting data storage to a web-based location. Using an intranet or virtual private networking (VPN); cloud computing will facilitate access to files, data and collaborative project materials from anywhere in the world.
Relying on the Cloud vs on-premise lowers your maintenance costs, is incredibly scalable and enhances your team’s productivity with easy access to the digital resources they need from anywhere they can access the web.
Cloud hosting is becoming increasingly mainstream as companies realize the benefits of:
- Improved data security
- Low cost set up
- Zero maintenance costs
5) SaaS
SaaS stands for Software as a Service and it’s enabling businesses to reduce overhead by minimizing the time and budget needed for IT teams to perform setup and maintenance of a computer network.
SaaS makes possible the seamless and adaptive use of virtualized desktop environments for remote working — keeping staff distributed over a wide area ‘on the same page.’ Imagine a remote or traveling team of employees who can access proprietary software and databases from any location they can log on to the internet — as if they were all working on the same wide area network (WAN). SaaS has the potential to globalize the traditional workforce without compromising productivity.
