5 Advantages of Adopting a Cloud-Native Technology Infrastructure

The number of enterprise applications that run on cloud is so big now that it is wiser to refer to the cloud as a way of doing IT rather than labeling it as an IT innovation. Today, the concept of cloud native applications is a mainstay and the new normal. For those who are not acquainted with the term, a cloud-native application in its simplest form implies an enterprise application that has been designed and developed specifically to run on cloud infrastructure.

It means that cloud-native application development is rooted in containers, microservices, and dynamic orchestration. The paradigm shift from costly on-premise technology infrastructure to on-demand subscription-based service availability has found takers from all business domains and includes all magnitude of enterprises ranging from multinational corporations to small and medium businesses. In fact, research firm Gartner estimates that today over 80% of all internally developed software enterprises are cloud-native. So why is there a growing affinity for cloud-based technology deployments? Here are some key benefits you would experience with a cloud-native strategy for your technology stack:

1. Cost Efficiency

Tougher market competition and dynamic consumer needs require you to constantly upgrade and evolve your business’s technology infrastructure to roll-out new services and offerings through digital channels. Configuring or re-engineering on-premise enterprise applications that handle various aspects of your business will involve heavy costs and time which will eat into your overall IT budgets.

The market dynamics change so fast that you may need to alter or roll back new features on your consumer-facing digital channels as soon as they get launched, in order to make way for newer or modified ones. When IT expenses go overboard, it will impact your profit margins significantly, leaving you with the minimal financial muscle to invest in your core business. With cloud native applications, upgrades, as well as dynamic changes to software, can be easily handled. By configuring changes incrementally to the cloud application, it can be quickly made available to end-users at considerably lower costs.

Related Reading: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest?

2. Flexibility and Scalability

As with any cloud-based software deployment, you get the benefit of scale on-demand with a cloud native application strategy. When your business starts out from the root stage, you may not need massive amounts of storage or computing power to run various digital customer channels and as time passes, this requirement may vary depending on growth factors. This is where the scale on-demand capability of the cloud will be very attractive. You need not maintain physical storage or computing hardware regularly to scale up your technology back end when demand spikes occur. Everything would be easily managed on the cloud and business owners can focus on ideas and initiatives to expand their customer service while the technology silently scales up behind the curtains to ensure there is no disruption.

3. High Availability

For any digital-friendly initiative that a business wants to propagate to engage with their customers, a key necessity is the constant availability of the back end digital applications that make this experience possible. If the technology has been built with an on-premise model of operation, then not only does a business need to ensure the application’s resilience, it also needs to ensure that the supporting hosting and maintenance infrastructure is robust to empower continuous business without disruption.

With a cloud native architecture for your business applications, this disruption-free availability is a guaranteed benefit. Leading cloud service providers offer uninterrupted availability of the hosting environment with limitless expansion flexibility to accommodate sudden spikes of transactions or business growth. This gives business owners one less major technology paradigm to worry about. Additionally, there is 24 X 7 support from cloud vendors to assure that any challenge is mitigated seamlessly without causing any disruptions to your business operations.

4. Increased Efficiency

With a cloud native application architecture, it is quite easy for enterprises to automate a large number of tasks involved in the operation and deployment of their digital infrastructure. By building components within an application as microservices, it is easy for scaling, modifying and upgrading specific features or modules within the application without having to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. Besides, cloud native applications are inherently extensible through APIs that enable them to be integrated seamlessly with other reporting and analytical tools for deriving insights that can be used for better decision making by enterprises.

5. Secure Data Management

While it has been proven beyond doubt that public cloud environments offer nearly unbreakable security for your business data, several decision-makers do not want to move their core data systems to public cloud infrastructure for fear of security threats. By creating cloud-native enterprise applications, you get to manage your data on your own private cloud infrastructure and ship data to and from various systems in your own cloud environment. While storage and expansive flexibility can be availed from leading cloud providers, you have control over your entire application landscape wherein your own security policies and protocols can be implemented in addition to the standard procedures followed by these vendors.

The unparalleled benefits offered by a cloud-native application strategy is a boon to businesses that want to engage with the digital-savvy consumer base of today. From handling their internal operations to building customer-facing digital channels, businesses can rely on enterprise cloud service providers like InfinCE to deliver a robust and secure environment to build and deploy applications. Get in touch with us to see how InfinCE can help transform your business’s technology into a truly cloud-native one.

Are you trying to renew your SSL Certificate? Here is everything you need to know!

An SSL Certificate is required by a website to ensure secure server connections. In today’s world, an SSL certificate for a website is as important as a seat belt for a driver. All online businesses must take web security seriously. More than 43 percent of cyber-attacks target small businesses because of their ignorance of such basic security considerations. So how does an SSL certificate protect a website and why is it essential to renew it? Before we dig deep into these questions, let’s take a look at what SSL actually means.

What Is An SSL Certificate?

SSL (Secure Socket Layer), is a global security technology that encrypts communication between web browsers and web servers, reducing the threat of sensitive information on a website being intercepted or hacked. To enable this secure connection, an SSL Certificate, also referred to as a digital certificate, is installed on the webserver. The certificate is issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) that confirms the website identity to a web visitor’s browser. That, in turn, ensures that the communications between the browser and the website are based on website-specific data that is valid, accurate and up-to-date.

There are 3 common certificate options. The certificate that requires the lowest (minimum) level of validation is the DV or Domain Validated certificate. This is the most common type of SSL certificate. It is confirmed against the email address listed in the domain’s WHOIS record.

The OV or Organization Validated certificate requires that the CA check that the business making the request has a verifiable physical (street) address. The organization’s name is included in the certificate.

The highest level of security that can be employed is the EV SSL and is available only for businesses, corporations and other entities. The validation and verification process to install an EV SSL certificate is more comprehensive and rigorous, requiring that multiple verifications be provided. Visitors to a website holding an EV certificate are alerted by leading browsers to this higher level of certification by displaying the website’s URL with a green background.

The SSL Certificate authenticates the identity of the website ensuring the visitors, safe surfing through the website. The security technology encrypts the data that is being transmitted and ensures safe connection at both ends. Apart from the primary benefits of authentication and encryption, installing an SSL certificate can give your website additional advantages:

• Improved search engine ranking: According to a study by Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko.com, HTTPS websites have higher Google ranking. Not surprisingly, because in 2014 Google announced it had changed its algorithm to give better ranking to HTTPS-enabled sites, in part to encourage firms to improve their security.
• Improved customer trust: An SSL certificate, easily enables visitors to identify the legitimacy of a website. Enabling an OV or EV SSL, allows site visitors to view organization details, which guarantees the website is genuine and helps in building customer trust – particularly important for eCommerce websites – and an increased chance for long-term customer relationships. Browsers automatically detect websites that employ SSL and indicate to the web browser that fact by displaying a padlock icon in the address line of the browser.
• Comply with the PCI/DSS Requirements: To enable online payments, the Payment Card Industry(PCI) requires the installment of SSL certificate on your site, which is one of the 12 primary requirements of the PCI/DSS.

Why Is It Necessary To Renew The SSL Certificate?

An SSL Certificate has an expiry date hardcoded in it so that the encryptions are kept up-to-date. Renewing the SSL Certificate every two years will help you maintain the latest SSL versions and ciphers. When an SSL certificate expires, the users get a warning from the web browsers indicating the renewal. The security technology can be renewed 90 days prior to the expiry, which is ample time to get a new certificate issued and installed. 

When the SSL certificate expires and no action is taken to renew it, the website loses its padlock and site seal. The visitors to the site will notice no SSL product on the site and this could affect their trust and security towards engaging with the website, which can directly affect the website traffic and ranking.

To learn when the certificate for a website is going to expire use one of the many online SSL checker sites, such as https://www.sslshopper.com.

How Can I renew the SSL Certificate?

Now, since it’s clear why an SSL certificate cannot be allowed to expire, let’s see how can it be renewed.

When an SSL certificate expires, a scary-looking warning message is displayed to the website visitor.

Since the renewal procedure can be time-consuming, authorities allow the certificate to be renewed in a 90-day window from 60 days before to 30 days after the expiration date.

The renewal procedure is conducted with the original provider of the certificate. Usually, it involves three simple steps:

• Log in to your account, select your respective certificate, and purchase a renewal credit.
• Generate the renewal certificate (that is, a replacement certificate) 
• Upload it to the server hosting your website.

However, before you generate your renewed certificate, ensure you fulfill the following best practices:

• Conduct a basic check on the server, such as a health check or log monitoring, to identify any known issues.
• Generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) to apply for the SSL renewal certificate. A CSR can be generated by logging in to the server’s terminal and applying the following command. (Provided OpenSSL has been provided on the server. A Windows server will require some additional configuration to be able to run this command.) After entering the required information, you will be able to open the CSR in a text editor which can be copied directly to the SSL renewal form.

• Comply with the necessary information demanded or additional verification required by the Certificate Authority.

When your SSL certificate is issued, you will be informed by email. Once you receive your certificate and the private key provided with it:

• Verify the certificate and key before applying it to the server.
• Apply the certificate to the server.
• Conduct a basic vulnerability test related to SSL and apply patches if required.
• Conduct a basic test on the website after the installation.

In case of an OV/EV SSL certificate, ensure the legal company information you submit is identical to the public listing. If these steps aren’t clear, get assistance from your hosting provider. 

Although implementing and renewing an SSL certificate might seem a bit complicated and time-consuming, it is becoming more important than ever to have one. Websites that do not use an HTTPS encrypted SSL certificate are essentially advertising that they are unprofessional. 

Leading browsers like Chrome and Safari alert the user when an SSL certificate expires, generating a scary-looking warning message similar to this one:

Customers of INFINCE, a full service IT offering by Fingent, don’t need to worry about the SSL certification process. Along with empowering their organization with cloud integration and enhanced business collaboration and productivity tools, INFINCE also completely automates the SSL certificate renewal procedure, eliminating the entire hassle.

Top 5 Possibilities You Must Explore to Build The Office of the Future

While most leaders look at ways to keep their business competitive with upcoming market trends, they often fail to look at areas that may seem less important. But in reality, these few areas can make a huge difference in improving the competitiveness of your workforce. This will ultimately impact your business’s bottom line as well. One such area is re-imagining your office to empower your workforce to work better in an increasingly innovation led landscape. The office of the future is beyond the four walls of a building and focuses more or deriving value from resources rather than enforce policies to keep them engaged at work. From communication to collaboration, the digital transformation wave has created new possibilities in every aspect of an office environment. It’s never too late to re-imagine your office to suit the needs of tomorrow, but the longer it takes for you to note the trends that shape the future, further down will be your innovation index in a competitive market. To solve this dilemma and empower you with the right decision, we have compiled a list of the top 5 trends, every future office will witness in the coming years. Make sure you explore each in detail and invest wisely.

Remote Work

Studies show that at least 70%of the global workforce works remotely at least once a week. In fact, the millennial generation rarely opts for a company that forces them to relocate from their hometown and be at the office physically all through the year. By offering a flexible work environment, it has been proven that employees are happier and feel more engaged at doing their work which will reflect positively on their output and productivity. The question now is “How can a remotely located workforce work together with in-house staff to drive value for the company?”

The answer lies in technology solutions like INFINCE, that help organizations manage their employees irrespective of where they are located. INFINCE enhances collaboration and work quality by creating a virtual unity for the entire workforce irrespective of their location. Besides, such a cloud-based platform can save cost considerably by allowing employees to work remotely and save on infrastructure.

Diverse Communication Platforms

When we say office communication, the common items that run into our minds are email and VOIP calls. But today the horizon of office communication has evolved considerably from just these two options. There are social media styled intranet tools available to help employees engage better with their peers and these intranets also serve as announcement boards for various purposes. Open positions, important event announcements, new policy or process announcements, are just some of the key elements that can be communicated through such platforms to your organization as a whole.

Besides, such platforms also offer multiple levels of access controls and permission-based roles for different teams to communicate with other internal employees as well as with external vendors and partners. The office of tomorrow definitely needs a big boost in terms of offering flexible communication platforms and very often scenarios demand multiple communication tools be integrated to work together efficiently and offer the best experience for employees in all your office locations both in-house and remotely. Having the right technology infrastructure to promote open communication is a key factor in keeping your office communication standards competitive with the best in your industry.

Digitally Empowered Workforce

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will seek its entry into mainstream office culture in the near future. Smart office assistants will be guiding employees through business processes just like how virtual assistants like Google Now and Siri guides consumers. Intelligent notifications, schedules, alerts, and information discovery assistants will help employees work better and faster to deliver better value to the enterprise.

Additionally, organizations can keep a check on their employees’ health through smart wearable tech devices like bands and watches. These can double up as digital access cards to help employee’s access office infrastructure without having to carry an ID card and similar items. The stage is set for large scale digital transformation of employee productivity and a combination of intelligent data processing as well as connected hardware will form the basis of this transformation. Your workforce will be more empowered in the office of the future and will require less time to adapt to new work requirements and office spaces.

Innovative Meeting Spaces

Workplace interactions are pivotal in fostering a healthy work culture irrespective of the industry your business operates. Very often, there are requirements where multiple folks have to brainstorm and discuss to arrive at a solution for a business or operational challenge. The traditional meeting rooms where such solutions get their starting are evolving rapidly. In the future, we will witness the rise of virtual meeting rooms that combine multiple telecommunication mediums with technology innovations like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR).

Presentations will never be the same as in the future, you can expect human presenters to remotely take sessions through VR or AR guided imaging. While teleporting and other similar sci-fi movie stuff is not a guaranteed innovation, virtual meeting rooms where teams across the world can communicate through an immersive video conferencing platform is sure to take off in the coming years. This will transform meetings from their boring themes of today and make the audience and participants more engaged with facts and interactive presentations. This also interleaves with our first prediction of flexible remote work as employees who are away from the office can also take part in interactive sessions through such innovative conferencing solutions.

Greener & Smarter Buildings

Across the globe, entrepreneurs are becoming more aware of their role in creating a better working world by contributing not just social wealth but also by creating an environment-friendly workspace. In the US alone, the number of construction projects that have LEED certification has risen from just around 296 in 2006 to over 65,000 in 2017. While remote work options will be in plenty in the future, the demand for a solid physical office space for corporate affairs will always be there. This need will be transformed into a need for greener buildings that consume less of our energy resources to keep the building ventilated, illuminated and visually appealing.

From conserving water to harvesting solar energy to power electrical systems, companies will continue to invest in making their businesses as environmentally friendly as possible. For such aspirations to reap value at the earliest, future office spaces will make use of the Internet of Things (IoT) powered sensors and hardware to ensure that their efficiency levels are high. Automatic lighting and cooling systems based on occupancy, smart cleaning and maintenance infrastructure, intelligent water and waste management systems, etc., will be crucial in creating a higher green print for office buildings of the future.

The office of the future will have a large number of revolutionary innovations to help employees deliver better work outputs. We have captured the 5 most important possibilities that will become a reality soon at future offices. The digital wave will continue to disrupt the traditional workspace culture and employees will witness a new era of connected and secure workplace that help them work from anywhere and anytime without glitches.

Businesses need to invest in making their technology infrastructure secure and more flexible to adapt to innovations such as the ones we explored in this blog. The best way to begin will be to onboard next-generation enterprise technology platforms like INFINCE to seamlessly transit into a digital-first business. Talk to our experts to see how your business can compete with the best in the industry through digital excellence.

The 5 small business digital trends that cannot be ignored in 2019

The digital transformation wave is gripping all industrial sectors as we speak. But is it really only meant for the big names in the market? Can financial muscle determine the progress a business can make in the digital space? The answer is simply NO! The best thing about the new age digital paradigm is that it opens up possibilities in digital innovation for industries of any size be it small, medium or large enterprises. A lot of thought has come up from revolutionary leaders in the market that focus on empowering small businesses to achieve high levels of success in their business operations. These thoughts have now transformed into the most happening trends in the small business sector and key players are constantly looking at ways to realize value by following and implementing these trends.

Now comes the crucial question. How can small businesses gain knowledge about the right or in fact the best digital trends that suit their operational model? Well, we have it covered in this blog. It’s barely past the first quarter of 2019, and if you are a small business entrepreneur, then we have compiled a list of the top 5 digital trends that your small business needs to onboard in 2019, to achieve success and remain competitive in the highly crowded market.

Let’s begin the exploration:

1. Subscribe to intelligence

Yes, we are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) here but in a more suitable way for small businesses. Today, nearly all top AI-powered technology services are available on a subscription basis for businesses of all sizes to pick and choose based on their needs and preferences. The same AI technology that powers tech giants like Google and Facebook could be used to boost autonomous offerings in your small business as well. This is a big boost for your business sales prospects as well. Studies have shown that the presence of an AI element can boost sales of companies as< 49%< of consumers will be confident in spending money more frequently in business with AI enablement.

All departments of a small business from customer service to human resources, operations and logistics can embrace the power of AI and ML to enable sustainable growth. When insights about customers are made available through tools, small businesses can use them to make business decisions faster and with more accuracy. On the operations side, AI can help small companies hire smarter with faster candidate resume profiling for relevant skill matching through machine learning. The possibilities when AI is enabled are many for small businesses.

1. Personalized marketing

Gone are the days, when fancy advertising and celebrity endorsements formed the crux of marketing for businesses. Today, a small business can creatively outperform a larger brand in the same industry for marketing excellence. By marketing, we do not simply imply great visual representations and ads, but how technology can be a crucial component in bolstering marketing efforts for small businesses. With marketing automation, it has been proven that there is a 12.2 % reduction in marketing overhead and this will positively impact lead generation as well.

In fact, four out of five users of marketing automation witnessed an overwhelmingly positive increase in leads generated. In addition to the numbers, the quality of leads that are generated through targeted and highly personalized marketing tools available today, are significantly higher as well. By diving deep into insights derived from AI enabled marketing tools, small businesses can create high impact campaigns that have more chances of conversion. As for target user segmentation, today’s marketing automation tools help to identify leads that have higher chances of conversion based on past preferences and behavior. It also saves time and money of marketers who would have otherwise spend hours or even days to send thousands of emails to folks who have very minimal chances of doing business with the organization.

Related Reading: Simple Ways to Create a Small Business Website in 2019

1. Workforce Management

A small business often has restrictions on the physical work infrastructure they can offer for employees. But today, the lack of dedicated physical office space is never a constraint on measuring the success of your business. Thanks to advancements in digital tools, it is possible to have a workforce managing your business operations from literally anywhere in the world. You only need to provide a working space for employees that must absolutely be located in an office environment to run your office. Others can simply connect to your business remotely and there are tons of collaborative and management tools available to ensure that a remote workforce operates as efficiently as an in-house team.

Additionally, if your business requires executives to be deployed at filed locations or at customer premises to carry out tasks, then there are tools that assist them to deliver more valuable services. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020,75% of field service organizations with more than 50 users will utilize the capabilities of a mobile app to deliver customer delight. Thus, managing a workforce becomes quite seamless with a host of digital tools available for small businesses to help them empower their workforce to work better and more productively.

1. Digital Payments

You may argue that almost all businesses small or large offer convenient payment modes for customers, it is a known fact that this convenience is limited to cash or card in most cases. The customer of today, however, expects more than just a card swiping option to pay for his or her purchases. This is where small businesses need to invest in building or incorporating world-class payment infrastructure to help serve customer needs better. This includes digital wallets, NFC enabled smart payments on smartphones and wearable devices and much more.

While the physical infrastructure and complexity for such smart payment solutions are less, there is a considerably high level of technical prowess involved in facilitating the solution seamlessly. Sensitive financial data of customers has to be managed securely as any event of a breach will likely result in lawsuits and tarnished reputation which may be difficult to recover. Moreover, this sensitive financial data may at times be shared with your businesses vendors as well for settlement of invoices, etc. More the number of stakeholders, greater is the security assurance needed for the digital payment infrastructure. This trend will be crucial when a small business starts to grow global ambitions as today’s technology allows you to scale rapidly with virtual platforms like e-commerce sites and partners.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

1. Data Privacy

We already covered a portion of this in the payment trends section but considering the rapid scale in which consumer data is generated and consumed by businesses, data privacy is a trend and force to reckon with. Today, every single piece of information be it past interactions of a customer with your business or their preferences in investing or their personal and social media interests are all acquired and analyzed for arriving at business decisions. While this is a good thing for business, several users have repeatedly voiced their concerns on the growing trend of sensitive customer data becoming exposed to fraudulent and inappropriate proceedings. Increasing compliance requirements like GDPR and other international privacy laws will impact the way in which small businesses operate using consumer data.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that the digital systems and business processes that handle sensitive customer information have strict guidelines for privacy preservation as fines for any mishaps could literally throw your business out of operations. Data privacy policies and tools needed to safeguard customer data are an important asset for all businesses irrespective of their business domain and geography.

If you are a small business owner, then the 5 trends that we covered in this blog are of prime importance. They can very well define the future of how your business will perform in a highly competitive market. With the vast array of digital tools available to support various facets of your business, it is quite natural to get confused about where to start investing and exploring. This is where INFINCE comes to the rescue. With cloud-based integrated solutions, INFINCE can bring together the robustness of suite solution for enhanced productivity and efficiency.

INFINCE – Build Your Team & Collaborate

InfinCE is a cloud platform built to run your business in a completely new way via information technology. This cloud-based software comes fully-supported, hassle-free, user-friendly and very much cost effective. Having InfinCE at your small business is like taking your business to the next step by simplifying the way you work and concentrate on your business growth. The efficient functionality of INFINCE combined with its user-friendly technology and flexible features allows you to manage everything from the simplest to the most complex, in a convenient and comfortable manner.

Why should a small business opt for InfinCE?

“A big business starts small,” said Richard Branson. The road to becoming large-scale for broadening services and reach begins with finding and deploying the right technology solutions. Technologies like the cloud have turned out a major disruptor and undergone widespread adoption by businesses, big and small.

Compared to on-premise technology, cloud platforms have global accessibility, secure infrastructure, and reduced spending. INFINCE brings the cloud advantage within reach of small businesses through its –

• Simplified Cloud-based Technology – Set up your own website and email with just a few clicks.
• Efficient Office and Collaboration Tools – Collaborate efficiently, share documents quickly, and bring your workforce together from different locations.
• Secure & Private Preconfigured Cloud – Privacy and security for your data on secure private virtual servers.
• Curated Applications Marketplace – Click and buy business applications from a growing list of applications including CRM, CMS, and HRM solutions, hosted on secure cloud environments and dedicated to your need.
• Single Sign-On Accessibility  – Single Sign-On enables you to have unified access to all your business software.
• Concierge IT Services – Enjoy seamless IT with hosting, maintenance, and updates managed by a dedicated team.
• Seamless User Interface – Intuitive user experience for beginners.
• Enhanced Mobility – User mobility with mobile apps for smartphones and tablets with white labeling.
• 24/7 Technology Support – Highly dedicated support team with an email, live chat, and phone support.

Related Reading: INFINCE Presented with the 2018 Great User Experience Award

How to Deploy InfinCE in your Business

The process displayed below will help you to know how easily INFINCE can be set up and made ready for use in your organization.

Collaboration Tools in InfinCE

InfinCE is a one-stop solution that integrates an array of tools with the capability to do multiple things.

Applications – On Purchase

Apart from the collaboration tools, you have the option to purchase applications for specific business needs.

How will InfinCE Help your Business?

Small businesses need to execute their projects in a very efficient and economical way. They can boost their productivity and efficiency with INFINCE as their preferred technology partner. INFINCE helps project teams get their work done faster, no matter how or where they work. The cloud-based solution brings dispersed teams together as they work through planning, managing tasks, allocating, tracking, document management and other functions.

Collaborative Work Environment

• Collaborate with all the team members. (i.e. internal, external, remote, and distributed team members)
• Virtual workplace enhances collaborative project planning and better work streams
• Real-time chat and communication with team members
• Manage, share, and sync project calendars with personal calendars of members
• Helps individual team members keep commitments by having personal task lists and deadline reminders
• Conduct online meetings
• Centralized data, documents, and contacts allow cross sharing between the team
• Access virtual workplace to view project information through mobile/computer

Automated Planning and Scheduling

• Create virtual project teams with geographically dispersed members (i.e. internal, external, remote, and distributed team members)
• Better define and manage project requirements
• Efficiently schedule task duration, milestones, and deadlines

Digital Asset Management

• Keep everyone updated with version control, change tracking, and document history
• Easily secure file sharing between all team members from different devices
• Manage and archive project files securely in a structured and accessible way
• Have a good document repository for uploads and attachments

Server Properties

• Managed, private and secure server for everyone
• Separate dedicated server for each organization
• Flexible and convenient to use by all
• Stable and consistent
• Back-up options

User management

• User permissions and roles
• User Roles
• User Groups

How to Manage Tasks using InfinCE

• List, assign and prioritize tasks based on deadlines and dependencies
• Update task list status, organize, track and make visible to the team
• Personalized task management for individual team members
• Ability to oversee the tasks that are overdue, ongoing and planned
• View and analyze day-to-day tasks and progress across teams and projects
• Execute multiple projects with better quality, on time and efficiently

Related Reading: A Guide to Effective Cloud Migration

Who Will be Benefited Most Out of InfinCE?

• Construction Firms – A construction company to share client estimates, project plan, layout between the employees and clients as well as assign tasks to employees.
• Legal Services Firms – A legal firm to share case details between the lawyers and clients.
• Small scale Manufacturing – Small scale manufacturing companies to assign tasks, share documents, communicate between teams, and view product timelines.
• Marketing & Consulting Firms – Marketing and consulting firms to manage and collaborate tasks on different campaigns and project. Allows task scheduling, monitor time spent and measure ROI on all marketing projects.
• Health Clinics – Clinics can use INFINCE to manage the appointments of all the patients and store the patient’s history.
• Software Firms – For document sharing, task assignment, project management handling client calls, real-time chat, and marketing.
• R&D Companies – R&D can have project management tools to ensure the smooth transfer of knowledge and technology to other groups or departments involved in innovation, file transfer and file management.
• Insurance Firms – Insurance companies to enhance their performance, more products can be sold and retain customers by keeping the project on track, easy transfer of lead details, schedule tasks between employees and much more.

As a secure and economical cloud platform, INFINCE is the right choice for businesses running on limited capital. With its potential application stretching across a swathe of different industries, INFINCE brings the simplicity of the cloud and resources configured for optimal performance that elevates workforce productivity.  Get in touch with us today to deploy INFINCE at your business.

INFINCE Presented with the 2018 Great User Experience Title for Business Process Management Software by a Reputable Directory for Business Software

The highly reputable website for B2B and SaaS reviews FinancesOnline has certified INFINCE Cloud Servers with the 2018 Great User Experience award for delivering a well-designed IT solution with a consistent quality user experience. FinancesOnline conferred this award after they conducted a thorough evaluation of all our platform’s elements and features, from the “economical” INFINCE pricing to its core capabilities that simplify one’s technology needs.

To be eligible of FinancesOnline’s 2018 Great User Experience award, a solution must have an intuitive design, clutter-free interface, and user-friendly features. Comparing us against the top business process management tool in the market, FinancesOnline highlights INFINCE as a comprehensive solution that provides users with “total control” overall activities while simplifying repetitive processes through automation.

Other highlights for the FinancesOnline team include INFINCE’s “top class” administrative control, frictionless interdepartmental communication and collaboration, accessibility on any device, and customizable packages to perfectly suit specific requirements and specifications. All of these allow businesses to start achieving more with less time and effort, within a secure environment.

Aside from the comprehensive review, FinancesOnline also praised the platform as an efficient business process management system, with INFINCE earning a spot in its esteemed top 10 list. The cherry on top is FinancesOnline’s 2018 Rising Star award presented to INFINCE. This award is given to software solutions that have quickly increased in popularity and have established itself as a reliable brand despite being newcomers in the SaaS market.

Simply your business technology today on a smart and modern workspace with INFINCE!

Leading BRB Reviews Firm Confers Rising Star and Great User Experience Award to INFINCE

The leading B2B ratings and reviews platform CompareCamp has recognized INFINCE for its reliable cloud model by conferring the Rising Star of 2018 and Great User Experience Award.

The expert review team at CompareCamp came to the conclusion after a close evaluation of INFINCE’s capabilities in serving both small and large scale businesses with cutting-edge cloud IT solutions. Together, the review team undertook a detailed analysis of INFINCE, particularly in its ability to deliver. According to CompareCamp, INFINCE’s “top functionality centers on IT essentials which include secure cloud hosting, run-your-business software, and concierge IT services.” This indeed confirms the usability and versatility of our infinite cloud solution for small and medium businesses alike.

CompareCamp gave an overall 83 points for all the capabilities offered by INFINCE combined. In their product quality score, the review team gave the highest rating of 8.4 for the array of features embedded in INFINCE. They highlighted key features that differentiate our platform from the rest, which includes optimized information management, total administrative control, enhanced team collaboration and availability of plug and play business applications. From utility apps to file sharing, management and communications capabilities, INFINCE encompasses everything that a modern business must have at their disposal to maximize productivity and thrive competitively.

For ease of use, INFINCE managed to obtain an 8.2 score with its perfectly streamlined and centralized dashboards that enable effortless navigation and usage. The Great User Experience Award is conferred to INFINCE by considering its simplified cloud administration and management model. CompareCamp also lauded the inclusion of complete support for deploying and managing cloud services in INFINCE with minimal costs.

We conceived INFINCE with the aim of equipping small and medium business with state of the art cloud technology. It relies on a flexible cloud infrastructure with complete support for open source, SaaS and custom applications that encompass the IT requirements of most businesses. Besides, CompareCamp especially noted the excellent support offered by INFINCE as reflected in its 8.3 score for customer support.

Having a dedicated cloud solution with proper customer support ensures that your business is served with the right IT needs at all times. Moreover, it comes handy when you need additional compute resources or applications to accommodate the growth of your business.

INFINCE corresponds to an economical cloud solution that uplifts your business by offering affordable software options running under its secure cloud environment. It drastically cuts your IT spendings significantly through its optimally configured cloud and open source licensing.

Besides, the pre-configured setup gives you the right amount of computing resources needed to run your business smoothly. With it comes a horde of essential computing resources that will ratchet up your business productivity, all the while giving you the advantage of a true cloud service that you can access anywhere at any time.

Any business not having a website in today’s digital age not just run the risk of losing potential customers on a large scale, but also attracts serious questions on its standing as a credible firm. With business websites now simple and cheap to set up, businesses no longer have any excuse for not having a website in any case.

The Domain Name

The first step in building a website is choosing an available web address and registering the domain name. The popular names in website domain registration are GoDaddy and BigRock, among others. There are several others providers as well, and competition among the different players means very low rates on offer for the customer.

It is a good practice to register not just the .com extension for the website name, but also all the other popular extensions, such as .net, .info and any country-specific extensions such as .co.uk, .co.in and more. Consumers overwhelmingly use .com when entering a web address, but competitors taking control of other extensions for the same domain name may create serious issues for the business down the lane.

Having secured the domain name, there are many options for small businesses to set up the website.

The Conventional Hosting Route

The conventional method of subscribing of setting up a website is taking up hosting space and deploying a web admin to monitor the website on a 24×7 basis. The popular names in the hosting space are Hostgator, Amazon AWS, and others. Here again, competition means high-quality services for very low rates.

If in-house talent to design the website is not available, freelance websites such as UpWork offer businesses access to highly creative and talented designers and content writers, to design the web page. The rates are around $10 – $20 per hour.

Ready-Made Templates

Rather than painstakingly “reinvent the wheel”, businesses could access ready-made templates and website builders available in the net. The two popular options today are Wix and Weebly.

Wix offers a very large collection of ready to build templates, with an intuitive DIY builder thrown in. The easy to use interface makes it a perfect choice for non-technical users, who can set up a fairly good website on the fly. The platform offers a good app market as well.

Weebly offers ready-made templates and simple tools to create highly advanced web pages without writing a single line of code. The intuitive drag and drop elements make website creation and editing especially easy. Weebly’s responsive themes facilitate generating mobile-optimized websites on-the-fly.

While Wix and Weebly are perfect for generic websites or for selling a limited number of products, businesses that need to set up a proper e-commerce suite may consider Volusion e-commerce suite, which helps users create and manage an online store, sell products, and market your business.

Some of the alternatives to Wix and Weebly include Squarespace, Duda, Sitey, Webs, and Jimdo, among others.

Almost all the providers, including Wix and Weebly, offer free plans, allowing small business owners to start a small business website without spending a penny. However paid subscriptions get better features such as website stats, video, and audio support, removal of Wix branding, and other handy functionality. Paid plans start at $15 per month.

WordPress Website

Small to medium businesses who are somewhat tech-savvy but cannot afford to invest too much expertise into their website would do well to consider a WordPress website. The advantage of a WordPress website is access to unlimited features and functionality.

Creating a WordPress website is a 3-step process

• Sign-up for hosting
• Choosing any suitable WordPress theme. There are thousands of ready-made responsive themes on offer.
• Customize the theme to design the site.

WordPress is an intermediate website builder, and users may set up a WordPress website without any programming knowledge. However, WordPress has a traditional edit menu, and as such, users may require familiarity with backend menu. The process is fairly easy though, and it is possible to create a fairly decent website in under an hour.

While it is technically possible to set up a WordPress website for free, businesses short of in-house expertise would find it more convenient to subscribe to easy packages, which start from just $2.95 per month.

Two popular e-commerce solutions using the WordPress platform are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Creating an e-commerce website using Shopify is as easy as signing up, uploading the product details, and start selling. The hundreds of themes and extensions on offer facilitate easy customization.  However, Shopify doesn’t offer access to the direct code, limiting the ability to customize beyond a point.

WooCommerce is another advanced WordPress plugin, which also allows converting a regular WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce store. The significant advantage of WooCommerce is full access to the source code, throwing open the scope for unbridled customization.

Several providers such as Bluehost offers affordable all-in-one package, which may include the domain name registration, a business email account, and the WordPress website.

Regardless of the route chosen, never underestimate the importance of clean design, powerful content, and SEO best practices. A user decides whether to stay or leave a website in less than 3 seconds. As such it is imperative to make a good first impression. Clear navigation, action buttons, an overall minimalistic design, and constant monitoring to ensure speedy downloads all go in the way to making the website a powerful catalyst for the success of your business.  

The World Wide Web offers unbound potential. However, harnessing the potential requires offering stable and reliable solutions in what is essentially an extremely fluid and unstable environment. Web admins commonly encounter several issues which cause websites to go down or users to have a poor experience.

Here are the key web hosting challenges, and effective solutions to overcome such challenges.

1. Slow Website Loading and Navigation Speed:

Enterprises pay a very heavy price for slow loading websites.

Users rarely return to a website which takes a long time to load and/or which has slow internal navigation. Three out of every four web users do not return to websites which take more than four seconds to load. To compound matters, poor page load affects Google rankings negatively, leading to a downward spiral.

The best hosting providers adopt several strategies to preempt the slow loading of websites:

• Locating redundant servers across the world. The physical location of the data center hosting the website influences the page load time in a significant way. The nearer the data center hosting the server from the user’s location, the faster the load time of the website.
• Making use of quality hardware and infrastructure, to reduce network latency to the extent possible. Network latency is the time taken for a packet of data to reach one point, from another point.
• Offering Content Delivery Network (CDN), which makes available cached versions of the static portions of the website at optimized speeds, to several locations

2. The Challenge of Maintaining Uptime:

Web hosting thrives in a highly unstable ecosystem. Servers going down and various other issues are facts of life. However, downtime is fatal in the web hosting industry, and can even mean the death knell of the client’s business.

Web hosting companies need to ensure a minimum of 99.9% uptime rate, which is the industry standard.  Anything more than about 10 minutes of downtime a week is fatal. The main reasons for unplanned, emergency downtime are hardware or software failure, security breaches, and administrator errors. Planned downtime, for inevitable maintenance, is best performed at night or off-peak hours when the website visitor count is usually at its lowest.

Web hosting providers strive to maintain high uptime and overcome the challenge of downtime by:

• Deploying stable software, and updating it regularly, to prevent software failure
• Deploying high quality and proven hardware components
• Undertaking periodic software and hardware audit to pre-empt obsolescence.
• Offering online support on a 24×7 basis to clients, to resolve client queries and issues promptly.
• Offering FAQ’s, user forums and other forums to share knowledge, for speedy resolution of issues, and even preempt issues through timely client action.
• Ensuring sound network security
• Ensuring adequate protection from hazards such as floods and fire at the physical data center location

3. Challenges of Providing Scalability

Today’s e-commerce companies and website owners expect highly scalable resources. However, hosting providers are often hard pressed to provide it.

Many web hosting companies suffer from dated infrastructure, such as old server hardware, outdated software, a narrow broadband connection, and inadequately skilled support staff. Such restraint imposed a resource crunch, which impedes scalability.

Even when there is nothing wrong with the software or hardware, the limited resources being deployed, or the architecture of the data center may create bottlenecks. Emerging technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data offers unbound possibilities, but also makes huge demands on resources.

Inability to scale up resources when required may lead to websites bouncing due to some unknown restrictions, inability to log on to the mailbox or send email attachments, and limits being imposed without any option to mitigate it. For clients, this translates to missed opportunities and poor end-customer experience.

Successful web hosting providers:

• Overhaul their legacy infrastructure from time-to-time to ensure they are equipped to meet the demands made by emerging technologies.
• Identify the gap between requirements and infrastructure capabilities, and work towards filling the gap by provisioning the required hardware and software.
• Upgrade staff skills through training and other interventions, to ensure they are competent to do the needful when required.

4. Security Challenges

Web hosting companies are always under the Damocles sword of security. Cyber breaches are the order of the day. Breaches are costly in terms of loss of sensitive data, crippling regulatory fines, loss of trust and reputation, and more.

A common pitfall from web hosting providers is failing to restrict URL access. Without such restrictions, unauthorized users may view pages they should not have access to. With such access enabled, attackers may easily forge URLs to access hidden pages.

Many web hosting providers offer shared hosting as a low-cost solution for clients. However, sharing an IP address among clients means linking separate domains using a single server. When a client is blacklisted as a spammer, it leads to a situation where all other clients sharing the same IP is also blacklisted.

Web hosting companies may overcome the pressing security challenges by:

• Deploying the latest and state-of-the-art security infrastructure, including firewalls, networking monitoring systems, and more
• Implementing Secure File Transfer Protocol (STFP) to plug loopholes
• Blocking all file types not served by the application.
• Create an access control matrix which stops unauthorized users viewing content.
• Implementing strict access control mechanisms at the data center to prevent rogue insiders and unauthorized attackers from taking physical control over critical web assets.

Data Centers utilize several physical and digital resources to manage the daily operations. Highly successful providers are always on their toes, to ensure the deployed resources work as expected. They also strive to ensure proper management of day to day operations, undertake prompt and periodical updates, and attend to maintenance issues promptly. Last but not least, they never underestimate the value of a skilled team with experience and expertise.