Due to the novel Coronavirus, there is a boom in the work from home culture, led by the forced lockdown. The days of sitting in your office room for eight hours a day are gone!
Today’s technology, tools, and applications are capable of connecting and providing instant access to a virtual environment. Our machines running at far fetched locations have blurred the line between the physical office and where the work takes place! And without Cloud Computing, this would be a distant possibility even for the company with enormous resources.
To support remote working culture, businesses need to have the right tools. The strategy to implement remote work, for the time being, is up to you based on the business needs; but as far as tools are concerned, we are giving you suggestions and are spreading the names of few that you might have been already using!
There are four kinds of applications that every business need no matter small, medium, or enterprise. The usage of the apps depends on the company’s requirements. These apps are the need of the hour to run the businesses in the “work from home” phase. One thing is for sure, without cloud computing, the below-mentioned apps won’t be a reality. So, let’s take a look at all those apps:
1. Secure Cloud Desktops for Remote Employees
There are several cloud supported services that enable organizations with a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. The DaaS helps mobile and remote employees access the applications they need by delivering a cloud desktop accessible anywhere with just an internet connection using any supported device. Organizations can enable their workforce with a fast, responsive desktop of their choice that can be accessed anywhere, anytime, from any supported device.
You can try out following remote desktop services:
2. Virtual Contact Center
Businesses with the hierarchy of employees that need to be connected and go through various approvals to meet daily KPIs. Such organizations can be benefitted from a virtual contact center. The basic concept of a virtual contact center is to enable a fully operational contact center that can be operated virtually anywhere. All the managers, admins, supervisors, and even sales agents can work from home and perform all their normal contact center activities right from home or any remote location.
Agents can make and take calls that are recorded as logs. Supervisors can monitor and supervise agents in real-time as if sitting in the same office. Managers can view dashboards with all the activity logs and track everything all from home.
You can try out following cloud-enabled Virtual Contact Center services:
3. Remote Communication & Collaboration
The time of crisis made us realize the best use case of cloud services, i.e., to be able to connect, communicate, and collaborate remotely. Several cloud services can let you set-up virtual meetings, chat, and place business phone calls with a single, secure application from anywhere. The users don’t need to switch between different applications to collaborate. They can instantly go from a chat to a call, share the screen, and even invite more people to join your meeting.
You can try the most popular cloud-enabled Remote Communication & Collaboration services:
Trello is the best app for collaboration on different tasks. The users can enable it remotely from anywhere.
4. Content Collaboration
When connecting remotely, it becomes vital to ensure content collaboration in real-time. The cloud-based content collaboration applications enable users to share content, provide rich feedback, and collaboratively edit documents. As we know that cloud services make the most of modern APIs developments. So, users can also integrate the cloud-based applications with their existing systems, and offers a rich API to develop custom content-rich applications.
If you are at the dire need of content collaboration applications while working remotely, you can try the following services:
Google Productivity Apps (such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.)
Microsoft Office (this can be enabled online for collaboration)
Conclusion
Cloud has been the center of conversation for the past decade. Organizations that are already using core cloud services such as compute, storage, security, etc. to transform their IT strategies are at the utmost advantage in the time of crisis. They can quickly drive their business operations as they have already been running the operations on the cloud if not for long but for ample duration that they don’t need to struggle.
The applications mentioned above are crucial to enable remote work with ease, but there is so much more that cloud technologies offer. So, if your organization has realized the importance of cloud in the time of crisis; then make an action plan for how cloud can be centric to your digital transformation to overcome the business impact.