How to Stay on Top of Video Conferencing Software Security

Video conferencing has emerged as one of the simplest solutions to overcome the challenges of social distancing and restrictions on physical meetings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As more and more businesses are implementing video conferencing solutions for managing their day-to-day operations, the trend has led to the development of a wide range of collaboration platforms as well. However, as the demand grew, it brought along a few security challenges too.

Read more: 10 Benefits of Using Business Communication Apps to Future-Proof Your Company 

Businesses utilizing a video meeting platform to communicate with their team, clients, and customers need to understand that remote video conferencing carries an inherent data risk as well. That is why you need to ensure that you adopt the right cybersecurity measures to protect your organization’s confidential data. Below are 5 ways to help you keep your shared data safe while ensuring increased productivity and collaboration.

1. Monitor your network security

Implementing adequate network security measures is vital for keeping sensitive business data safe from hackers. It does not matter how secure the devices are that you use to connect to the video conferencing software; if you do not have proper network security, anyone can obtain the details shared via video conference by gaining access to the company network.

You can use encrypted passwords and customized firewalls to secure your network. Likewise, you should also use Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication for all users to reduce the risks of network breaches due to compromised user credentials. As SSO credentials are strategically linked to the specific user’s authorization and entitlements, it will help to monitor and control access to all the video conferencing units in case the user credentials are compromised.

2. Assess your current video meeting platform

If you are using a legacy video conferencing software solution, then you could be dealing with an outdated platform with weak security features. Even the best meeting software that performed well a couple of years ago can be at risk of security breaches if it is not updated regularly with the latest security patches. That means putting your employees, customers, clients, and your company reputation at risk. 

Note that installing updates may not work after a certain point for older video conferencing technology. So it will be wiser to upgrade to a reliable, modern team collaboration software like Infince. Users can enjoy enhanced communication, without the fear of data breach through Infince’s video conferencing platform. 

Read more: Why Is Infince A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

The latest video meeting solutions come with advanced data encryption features that will help to keep your online conferences private and shared data safe and secure.

3. Use tough-to-crack video conference passwords

In order to keep your video conferences secure, you need to secure both your software and hardware with 128-bit AES protection. This security measure will allow your video meeting platform to use a 128-bit key to encrypt and decrypt all the video calls. As it works by automatically generating secured keys before the start of each video conference, it makes cracking the passwords virtually impossible for hackers.

You should ensure that you secure all your new business conferences, instant video calls, personal meetings, and attendees with unbreakable 128-bit encryption. It is also important that you never shared the video conference links via open channels like social media, as it will make it very easy for hackers to hop into your video conferences and try to steal secure company data.

4. Get the best meeting software with domain-based approach

There are a lot of video conferencing solutions out there, but not all of them follow the domain-based approach to security. Choosing such a provider will help you to make sure that all the attendees can collaborate in a well-controlled and secure environment. Moreover, it will also ensure that you do not connect your video conferencing software directly to the internet without a firewall.

Regardless of whether it is managed by the video conferencing provider or by your in-house IT team, domain-based security will allow you to assign various levels of user permissions to have better control of the video conferences. This way, if hackers try to hop into your video meetings, they will not be able to enter the system without you granting access.

Read more: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020 

5. Ensure robust privacy policies

Choosing the best meeting software for your video conferencing needs also has the benefit of reliable privacy policies. Check that the video meeting solution you use has clear policies on the collection of user information as well as meeting content for any kind of advertising or marketing efforts. Moreover, you should also create a video conferencing policy for your company to establish clear guidelines and expectations for all users.

You should have a well-defined privacy policy that specifies who can connect to the video conferencing software remotely and how they should access and use the shared data. You can even prepare a list of team members, pre-approved clients, customers, and vendors, who can gain access to specific meetings to bolster the security of your video conferences.

Apart from following all the above-stated guidelines, you should also ensure that your employees are educated on how to host and manage a secure video conference. For that, you can conduct training sessions to explain the specific steps, recommended security settings, and company policies that they should follow to maximize video conferencing security.

Want to know how Infince can elevate your video calling experience with robust security and exceptional collaboration features? Get in touch with our expert today.  

How Technology Is Changing Workplace Culture for the Better

The workplace as we know of is continually evolving and there is no denying the fact that technology is playing a key role in that. Over the past decade, businesses across industries have seen numerous iterations of what their ideal workplace could look like and have taken strategic steps to achieve that. With the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are now more focused on transforming their workplace and make it safer and efficient for their employees.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce 

The development of workplace apps and integrated solutions has allowed businesses to focus on company culture and find ways to enhance productivity. It is widely accepted that happy employees work better, perform consistently, and even motivate others to give their best. With access to robust workplace technology solutions, employees will be more engaged, efficient, and loyal to the company.

How Workplace Technology and Culture is Evolving

Studies say that companies with a highly-engaged workforce see around 41% less absenteeism, 17% more productivity, and 20% more sales. These numbers perfectly justify the need of adopting top-notch workplace apps and streamline company culture and business operations. For the employers, using such rapidly-changing technologies opens up numerous ways to hire from a global pool of candidates for different job roles. 

Below are some ways in which workplace technology can help you to transform your company culture for the better.

1. AI and Automation will increasingly streamline business processes

Workplace technology is becoming increasingly intelligent with the incorporation of AI tools and automation. This can help reduce the load of many routine business processes and everyday tasks from your employees. Virtual assistants and automation solutions are already being employed by organizations to streamline their day-to-day repeated tasks such as sorting emails, handling data entry, sharing files, etc. As your employees do not have to spend their productive time on such routine and tedious tasks, they can focus on other important business processes.

Read more: Automation In Small Business: 4 Areas To Get Started

You can also employ automation software to monitor and manage various business systems so that your employees can seamlessly conduct audits and quickly generate reports. AI tools allow you to create different scenarios and estimate the practicality of your marketing and sales campaigns. Smart workplace apps can also help to apply different tweaks and see which one would be the most beneficial to realize your goals.

2. Workplace technology will improve usability and experience

According to an IDC report, more than 50% of user interface interactions will be performed using AI-powered technologies by 2024. Businesses are even adopting technologies like AR and VR to deliver a more intuitive work experience for everyone. When coupled with an all-in-one collaboration platform, your employees can access business apps and data from any preferred device that is connected to their workspace, even using VR/AR headsets. 

This can provide greater usability for employees, helping them to analyze critical data quickly, attend business meetings virtually, and collaborate with team members efficiently. It is seen that employees spend almost 20% of their weekly work time searching for information to do their job effectively. With reliable all-in-one workplace apps like Infince, teams can share documents and files quickly and even edit or annotate the documents with other team members in real-time. 

Read more: Top 10 Apps That Facilitate Secure File Sharing For Businesses In 2020

3. Remote work will be made more flexible with smart solutions

As the unemployment rate in the US is hovering around 3.6% alongside the high demand for skilled staff, you need to find out every possible way to engage and retain your employees. Remote work has been at the center stage for some time now due to the COVID-19 crisis and workplace apps hope to make it better. Aside from allowing employees to work on flexible hours, smart office and collaboration tools allow you to bring your workforce together from different locations.

This also helps you plan the right remote work model for your company. You can adopt workplace solutions that provide your employees with a secure and unified channel to access the required business data and collaborate with others to deliver the results you are looking for. It also allows your employees to choose the best work environments and tools for their work, while you can manage access and information security centrally.

4. Remote workplace technologies will reduce overhead expenses

Another prime advantage of remote work is reduced overhead costs for your company. All it requires is an all-in-one collaboration platform with all the latest features that you need for improving your employee productivity and efficiency. As your employees can work from home using their devices, it helps to significantly decrease the operating costs. Modern workplace culture with BYOD policies further helps you save on the space, materials, and utility costs.

The impact of using workplace technology is growing strong in every industry. Powerful workplace apps like Infince empowers businesses to make the most of digital transformation. Remote work software will not just ensure higher employee productivity and satisfaction, but also lead to better customer experience and help in superior revenue generation. Get in touch with us to understand how Infince can be the game-changing workplace application for your enterprise. 

10 Leading Apps for Secure Enterprise File Transfer in 2020

From being one of the world’s most severe pandemics, the COVID-19 disease has devastated economies of almost all countries worldwide by forcing them to go into lockdown situations that were unprecedented in the past. There are several businesses that have been forced to operate with their staff working remotely and their business moving to predominantly digital channels. From retail to finance, there was a rapid shift in consumer appetite from an in-person store or branch visit to availing of goods and services from the comfort of their homes. To sustain operations of their digital customer channels, businesses had to ensure that their workforce too was able to work seamlessly and productively from their homes. However, conducting daily business operations from home rather than an office environment had its fair share of challenges. One of the most dominant challenges that existed was facilitating seamless and secure file sharing between employees. 

Confidential files that involved sensitive information are often shared between employees of the same department or between departments for various operational reasons. While at the office, the securely monitored local network serves as the best medium to share files irrespective of a file’s size. Being locally hosted and monitored, there wasn’t any threat from erroneous or malicious access being made of the files. For employees who now have to work from home, businesses have to rely on internet-based file-sharing platforms to enable continuity of their operations through successful employee collaboration.

Read more: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

Keeping this need of facilitating secure file transfer between employees, let us explore the top 10 apps that help businesses achieve this feat seamlessly:

1. Infince

If you are looking for a one-stop-shop to enable your business to transition into a digital-friendly one, then Infince is the solution you have been searching for. Infince offers unparalleled cloud file storage and sharing options as well as becomes a comprehensive enterprise digital platform for collaboration, customer relationship management, HRM, and all core operational areas. Infince offers a branded cloud platform and a custom website builder with personalized options to match your brand’s identity. 

Read more: 5 Features of Infince that will Transform The Way You Work 

2. Dropbox Business

One of the early birds in the cloud storage market, Dropbox made its name from being the preferred destination for storing and sharing files online. For businesses, they have a dedicated enterprise version offering seamless file sharing, collaboration, and synchronization while ensuring secure information exchange between stakeholders.

3. G Suite Google Drive

Google is the undisputed leader for personal communication and collaboration with its range of services like Gmail and G Suite web productivity and storage apps. For businesses, Google offers an even more superlative file sharing and collaborative experience with its dedicated business focused G Suite Google Drive services. With highly affordable subscription plans and splendid support, it offers a great value proposition for businesses of all sizes.

4. One Drive for Business

Microsoft did not want to be left out of the enterprise file sharing market when its key rivals were all offering highly competitive products to entice customers. The One Drive for Business platform offers a highly scalable cloud-based storage and file sharing service that allows employees to securely share large files with their peers effortlessly and also get access to Microsoft’s leading enterprise collaboration tools like MS Word, PowerPoint, etc. as integrated subscription options for very attractive prices.

Read more: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020 

5. Citrix ShareFile

Citrix is a darling of the enterprise world where thousands of companies rely on their virtualization and secure remote access platforms to conduct business. The file-sharing app offered by Citrix offers an equally efficient job of helping businesses facilitate better and more secure file sharing to sustain their operations.

6. Firefox Send

The world’s most popular open-source web browser offers a free and secure file sharing feature via the Firefox Send option. It allows users to share files securely by simply dragging and dropping the file into the browser and share access links to relevant stakeholders. You even have options to set expiry for the files after a certain number of downloads or even set password protection for added security.

7. WeTransfer

WeTransfer provides business users with a simple drag and drop interface to host files on the cloud and share it with privileged access to any stakeholder. With free and paid versions available, the platform offers one of the quickest free sharing experiences for any collaborative file.

8. FileCloud

If you need a file-sharing platform that can be customized with your own intuitive corporate branding guidelines, then FileCloud is the perfect option for your business. It offers a highly personalized dashboard that can be modified according to your branding guidelines to give a unique user experience for all your employees while they use it to share files seamlessly with peers.

9. Box Business

Box is also one of the earliest cloud storage companies that revolutionized online file sharing. With seamless integration capabilities for G-suite, Office 365, and other popular collaboration platforms, Box makes for an attractive enterprise data-sharing platform with secure credentials thanks to its focus on encryption using data protection policies of high standards.

10. SendAnywhere

This is one platform that sticks to its name more rigorously to carry out its operations. It simply lets users send files from one location to anywhere using its secure data transfer channel. A paid subscription offers higher data caps and more control over transfer permissions making it a worthy contender for today’s business users.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

We hope you get to make an informed choice for your business’s digital future from our recommendations above and enable your staff to seamlessly share information and collaborate on work. Besides secure file transfer, Infince offers a basket of features that enable hassle-free and seamless remote work for enterprises of all sizes. 

Get in touch with us to know more about how Infince can be the best remote cloud platform for your business. 

Why is a custom web domain important for your business branding needs?

Having a website is considered a standard pre-requisite for today’s businesses as it is likely the first place where people will enquire about the business and its offerings. While creating and hosting a website is no big deal today with the tons of ready to deploy template website builder services available, there is one element that you must focus from a branding perspective for an enterprise website. It is none other than a custom domain name. For example, if your business name is “John’s Giant Ice Cream”, then a website with URL as www.johnsgianticecream.com will be more appealing from a branding perspective than having one such as www.johnsgianticecream.wordpress or www.johnsgianticecream.blogger.com. The same logic applies to your enterprise email id as well. If you have an official email account that reflects your business name as the email domain rather than Gmail or Hotmail, it is better from a branding perspective.

Let us examine 5 benefits of branding that your business will experience if you have a custom website domain and email:

1. Brand Recognition

Having a co-branded domain such as wordpress.com/mybusiness would be harder to remember for customers than one such as www.mybusiness.com. This would make it easier for customers to pass information about your business to their friends verbally or via telephone calls. The element of simplicity in having a custom website and email URL will ensure that your customers, both existing and prospective, can reach out to you at the earliest, in case there is a need for them to avail of your services or buy your products.

2. Risk-Free Personalized Identity

From a business point of view, having a unique website and email domain would ensure that they have a unique existence. When you have a 3^rd party sponsored co-domain as your business’s web address, then there are chances that you may have to change them in the future depending on policies made by the service provider. The service provider could cease to exist due to other issues and your domain goes down with them thereby impacting the large presence you would have built over the years with that website. Considering the risks involved in such a scenario, a custom domain for your website and email makes sense for a secure and seamless future for your business with a personalized identity.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Building a simple website for your business’s online reach is not a very tough thing to do. But making it visible in search engine results with a high ranking takes a lot of effort. By having a custom website URL, it helps your website to rank better in search engine ranking algorithms that focus on uniqueness more than generic names and 3^rd party hosting service providers who append their names to your domain for free hosting. As such a unique URL is more likely to be shared on social media, they get better ranking credits on that front as well.

Read more: 5 Ways Virtual Private Server Make a Difference to Your Business’s Digital Future

4. Subdomain Flexibility

Very often you might face the need to create subdomains within your website to have separate showcase pages for a particular service or marquee product. When you do not have a custom domain for your business, the concept of subdomains becomes even more complex. In most 3^rd party hosted domain services, you do not even get that option to include further subdomain on your website. This further reduces your organic SEO efforts and also makes it harder for customers to trust your unique offerings and learn more information about them from the subpage.

Read more: 5 Tips to Select the Ideal Web Hosting Partner

5. Email Credibility

One of the biggest advantages of having a custom business domain for your web landscape is the ability to have a unique email domain. When contacting customers or prospects, having a genuine business name domain as the extension of your email address will add more credibility. From a receiver’s point of view, they will feel more genuineness in your business for the effort you took in creating a unique domain name for your website and email communication address rather than opting for a free service like Gmail or Hotmail. A professional email address is also a unique credential for your business to avail of multiple digital services available online today that helps in boosting your internet-based business services. Examples include payment gateways, information forms, cloud storage options, and much more.

Read more: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

Set up your professional custom domain and private email with Infince

If you are a business owner wanting to have a unique identity on the internet with a website and email, then you should definitely explore the option of a custom domain rather than opting for free hosting service providers. 

The several benefits in branding and customer experience you stand to enjoy as outlined above will be instrumental in growing your business in the coming years as more customers rely on internet-powered digital channels for their daily needs. 

Having a powerful digital ecosystem with credible domain and secure hosting infrastructure is the need of the hour especially for small and medium businesses. This is where Infince can be the ideal companion for your success. Get in touch with us to see how you can build and deploy a comprehensive web-based business online with custom URL and professional email service with Infince in a matter of days.

How can businesses gain a competitive advantage with Virtual Private Servers?

As more businesses take the digital route to beating competition, there is an increasing demand for Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology. It is becoming the number one hosting choice for businesses that experience very dynamic digital operations that peak and subside in a matter of hours or days.

For those who are new to the concept, a VPS is a virtual server dedicated to your business, but hosted on the cloud and managed by an underlying hypervisor that facilitates a portion of a physical server and associated computing resources to be allocated exclusively for a tenant. A VPS may be hosted and managed in a physical machine that also hosts other VPS and the entire ecosystem is made available on cloud by a cloud service provider or a hosting service provider.

Read more: 3 Strong Reasons for Your Business to Embrace Cloud-based IT Services

This VPS can be used by businesses to host a variety of digital platforms. So why has this technology of VPS having so many takers today? Here are 5 benefits of VPS that make it a formidable choice for businesses of all kinds:

1. Cost-Effective

Investing in a dedicated (private) server infrastructure would take costs through the roof. For small and medium businesses, this is not a luxury they can focus on since IT budgets would have to be optimized. With virtual private servers, SMBs get access to all the benefits of a private server on an on-demand pricing model where they only pay for the resources utilized. This helps them keep costs down and save on capital and salary expenses that would have to be borne had they decided to build a dedicated server infrastructure on their own and hire staff to maintain it.

2. Instant Scalability

Just as with cost, a Virtual Private Server based service offers businesses the desired flexibility in scaling their server performance and resources on demand. For example, a peak shopping season would require an e-commerce business to increase their computing and storage bandwidth on their servers to accommodate large spikes in traffic. The traffic may subside within a few weeks or months and then there would only be a normal flow of traffic to their website. Hence, it is not advisable to buy expensive server power to meet the demand for just a short period of time. With VPS, you can keep aside the tension of having to scale your server infrastructure due to demand without worrying about yearly costs. 

VPS service providers offer intuitive on-demand scalable packages for servers that allow you to subscribe for additional resources like bandwidth, storage, and computing power for limited periods to accommodate spikes in demand.

3. Reliability and Performance

The other option that has been popular with businesses for hosting their digital infrastructure was shared hosting. But this came with heavy reliability and performance issues. When the same infrastructure is shared by multiple businesses, spikes in traffic to other businesses can impact the availability of server resources to your business. 

With VPS, this problem is solved easily as your dedicated virtual space and computing space in the physical machine is abstracted and made available to you exclusively and is independent of the workload other businesses may exert on the same hardware. Hence businesses relying on VPS to run their critical digital infrastructure can be assured of reliability, high performance, and continuous availability all through the year.

Read more: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19

4. Customizable Configuration and Control

A shared hosting service does not offer businesses the flexibility to choose operational software on their server infrastructure. The configurations, operations control, software stack, etc. are all decided by the hosting service provider as they need to leverage the same machine for multiple businesses without any abstraction. This limits the freedom of hosting or operational technology for businesses in their digital platforms. 

With VPS, businesses are given full freedom to choose from a variety of operational software, hosting environments, and other added software installation support capability to build an environment best fit for their digital systems.

5. Managed Services

We have mentioned earlier that VPS does not require you to hire dedicated technical specialists to handle your IT infrastructure. Service providers like Infince offer a managed service wherein their specialists and consultants will continuously monitor the machinery and computing resources and network traffic to enable a seamless experience for your digital ecosystem. 

Read more: 5 Features of Infince that will Transform The Way You Work

You can continue to focus on improving your business via digital rather than worrying about keeping the backbone of your digital platforms stable and available. You are also relieved from having to invest continuously in upgrading infrastructure and software required to manage a private server for your digital platforms. The service provider will continuously monitor emerging market trends, evaluate their feasibility and ROI and make investments to ensure that your business gets access to the most competent server resources available in the market at no extra capital cost.

Read more: 4 Tips To Attain Success In The New Normal Remote Work Environment

As the world is continuously moving into a digital-first approach in every sector, SMBs need to have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem to keep their customers happy and satisfied. Having a fully integrated virtual digital backbone for your business with capabilities such as VPS is essential to ensure sustained growth. This is where Infince can be a game-changer. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can excel in the digital era with an all-in-one digital collaboration platform for all your needs.

Why Businesses Should Make Cloud their Number One Priority

In the initial days of business technology adoption, many companies were using technology only as a supporting tool for their operations. But today, these companies are turning their technology ecosystem into a mainstream revenue source. 

If you were to enquire about the most influential tech that spurred such a digital innovation for businesses of all sizes in the past decade, the answer will be cloud computing. The world of digital was thrown open for SMBs primarily with the growth of cloud computing over the last 10 years. Experts say that on a global scale, cloud-hosted workloads have grown from 45% in 2018 to 60% in 2019.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have started realizing more about the advantages of cloud-hosted digital channels. 57% of businesses that were surveyed recently report that their cloud adoption has increased anywhere between 26-31% after the pandemic’s strike. 

Besides, the growing digital-savvy consumer base is more than happy to welcome cloud-powered digital channels launched by their favorite brands. So businesses cannot turn away from the cloud-enabled customer and employee engagement channels.  

There are several factors that make cloud-based IT services the need of the hour. This post explores the top 3 reasons that accelerate cloud adoption among businesses:

1. Cost advantage

With cloud computing, an enterprise has the option to pay for only what they use from a technology perspective (pay per use). It could be anything from the number of users, storage capacity, computing power, bandwidth, or any combination of these. 

Unlike the traditional model of building an on-premise technology ecosystem that serves a large workforce to run critical business applications within a business premise, companies can tap into the power of modern-day digital platforms powered by Cloud, with just a web browser or through a mobile app or mobile site. This brings in a huge reduction in the IT operational costs and is one of the key reasons for the growth of cloud computing over the years.

2. Freedom to scale at will

For most businesses today, the rate of growth of their business will be highly dynamic in nature. There may be sudden spikes of consumer demand according to seasonal events like for example, retailers facing increased consumer spending during the holiday season. As with the spike, there may be periods of very low sales or growth volumes depending on various factors like for example the reduced spending by consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The traditional model of having a dedicated in-house digital platform to handle operations would thus require you to invest in installing high power machines and processing power at all times to meet surges in demand even though the surge will only be witnessed occasionally. With cloud-based digital platforms, businesses have the freedom to scale up or down depending on demand from their end consumers. They do not have to maintain any dedicated infrastructure, pay for full performance all through the year, or waste computing power without purpose. 

For instance, Infince’s cloud-based remote work collaboration platform offers you a dedicated IT infrastructure that’s well supported, maintained, and upgraded by us from time to time. This saves you from making any additional investments to spruce up your infrastructure forced by your public cloud service provider. 

3. Access to Continuous Innovation

One of the major disadvantages of on-premise software is that they turn obsolete in very short time frames. Newmarket innovations happen almost yearly or at even shorter time frames. This will force businesses to continuously invest in buying newer systems every year to keep up with competitors in terms of features. Cloud-based software on the other hand guarantees you access to a digital platform that will be constantly upgraded by the service provider based on market trends. 

As a business owner, you do not have to focus on R&D for identifying trends, incorporating newer features, and expanding the scope of the platform. All of these would be done by the service provider and offered to you instantly when the new feature is rolled out by them to the market. Be it AI or ML, big data analytics based insight generation or implementing blockchain, IoT, etc. your business will enjoy access to all emerging technological capabilities without having to worry about integrating the same to your digital channels.

Cloud-based technology infrastructure and applications will reshape the business world in more ways than one. As a business owner, your aim should be to pick the best cloud platform to manage and grow sustainably. Here is where Infince can be the game-changer. Some of the world’s growing SMBs trust Infince to handle their online work collaboration seamlessly. With capabilities such as CRM, ERP, private email, virtual private servers, custom website builder, marketing automation, etc. all available in one place, Infince is your one-stop destination to transition fast into a cloud-first business. 

Get in touch with us to know how you can leverage this all-in-one collaboration platform to manage work from anywhere.

How Infince Transforms the Way Your Workforce Operates Today

As vaccine trials show promising results, the world is in high hopes of recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic slowly. But the scale at which vaccination needs to happen, conquering challenges in production, logistics, demographic, political, and societal scenarios, is huge and hence it may take time for the total eradication of the virus. This means, the new norm of working for most companies wherein a good majority of their employees work from home, is likely to continue for the long term. However, 2020 witnessed the massive change of modern workplace software being increasingly brought to the traditional workforce wherein it only took a matter of days for millions of employees to work at the same pace from their home as they would from their office.

One of the most celebrated enterprise collaboration and digital platform for small and medium businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic was Infince. Some of the most demanding businesses managed to successfully keep their staff engaged and productive through seamless collaboration courtesy of Infince. 

Read More: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020

Today, let us take a look at the 5 key features of Infince that make it an undisputed leader in enabling better employee collaboration and transforming the way employees work remotely.

1. Easy Information Access

When employees work remotely, the biggest hurdle they face is getting information about their job activities at the earliest. With Infince’s cloud-based platform, companies can create a centralized virtual repository of all company information that employees can access based on their job roles. Infince allows privileged access control options to ensure that confidential or sensitive files and data are made available only to the right stakeholders and with proper logging of access to ensure transparency. 

The best part is that employees can access this information on the go right from the comfort of their smartphones thereby providing more flexibility. This allows them to plan better responses for customer-facing job objectives.

2. Improved Collaboration

With Infince, enterprises can create virtual workspace platforms wherein teams working on a project can converge and collaborate digitally. Be it brainstorming for solutions and ideas, daily standup meetings, project progress meetings, the platform allows all team members to digitally meet in one place.  You can securely share files, work together on documents, communicate via instant messaging, manage dependencies in work together, and create custom dashboards- both at the individual level or at the team/ department level to visually track and analyze what’s happening in your business. 

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

Collaboration is propelled to the next level as employees can carry out almost all sorts of work activities together just as how they would do so when they were at the office. This is facilitated irrespective of where your employee may be based out, anywhere on the globe.

3. Budget Friendliness

When a pandemic rips through economies worldwide, it is important for companies to preserve operational cash flow to the maximum possible limit. For this to happen, they need to enable a digital-first environment for employees that don’t burn a hole in their pockets. Infince has always been built for the cloud-centric enterprise of tomorrow. With a range of subscription pricing plans, the digital enterprise platform offers more value for every single dollar spent as a subscription charge. 

Infince offers small and medium businesses the flexibility to save on costs since they only pay for the features and scale they consume from the platform. This helps them significantly boost their operating margins as expenditure comes down drastically. The additional savings can go a long way in helping businesses preserve cash and sustain profitable operations in challenging times.

4. Secure Digital Infrastructure

Today’s businesses deal with a large volume of sensitive customer data that needs to be accessed and shared between multiple employees across different departments. When your entire work environment turns into a remote one due to a global pandemic, the concerns regarding data security heightens to new levels. This is where Infince assures peace of mind with its state-of-the-art security credentials. The platform offers you the choice to run your digital enterprise infrastructure on a secure private cloud location which can be monitored and managed effectively by your technology team without worrying about security threats.

From building your website to offering a secure intranet, Infince offers all the IT set up needed to run your business under one roof! Infince provides you a dedicated and secured cloud-hosted IT infrastructure comprising a private email server, dedicated virtual servers, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), intranet for internal communication, and custom website builder. 

Read more: How Infince enables you to quickly transit to remote working

5. Long List of Applications

Over the years, Infince has grown a large community of applications under its ecosystem that enables businesses to streamline productivity and improve engagement levels of their employees. Additionally, the platform also allows small and medium businesses to experience the digital transformation of their key growth activities like human resource management, marketing, and sales by introducing applications for CRM, marketing automation, HCM, and much more. 

The list of supporting apps for the Infince ecosystem has been steadily growing which makes it a complete digital package for today’s businesses. Infince helps you build a branded cloud platform with customization options to match your brand identity.

As your business operations are increasingly being disrupted, it is becoming clear that there is a need to rapidly transition your operational model to accommodate a highly digital-friendly workforce that can work from anywhere. Infince takes you closer to this goal by creating the most secure and cost-efficient yet feature-rich experience for your business’s digital infrastructure. Get in touch with us to know more.

Can centralized dashboards improve workplace productivity?

Dashboards are often an intrinsic part of today’s business world. From helping executives and leaders make decisions to enable seamless forecasting of business opportunities, they play a key role in the corporate world. But this curated information repository is not just meant for reporting and senior leadership alone. In today’s highly decentralized workforce environment that is increasingly being pushed to a remote future with a pandemic like COVID-19, employee dashboards are becoming a vital part of the workforce as well.

There is a huge demand for easy access to information within an organization at all levels. Several teams require access to different kinds of information like for example, project management dashboards where different project activities and tasks are managed, CRM dashboards that give a holistic view of marketing and sales activities, attendance and leave management dashboards for depicting employee activities and much more. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer

With remote working becoming a norm, here are 5 ways in which having a centralized dashboard can improve your businesses efficiency and work productivity:

1. Overview in a snapshot

A workforce dashboard for any department offers a comprehensive yet highly precise snapshot of the team’s or company’s performance. From getting inputs about a project task to viewing the progress of service requests, the employee dashboard enables the workforce to transparently seek information on demand. 

By customizing the nature of information available across departments, job levels, and roles, it is possible for organizations to roll out tailored initiatives for each individual and enable them to track their progress at each stage. It also gives a single source of truth for all employees to be able to stay updated with what’s happening across their operational units, departments, or job roles within the company.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using Infince

2. Setting up organization goals

With a customizable company dashboard, it is easy for the senior leadership to create a new objective, break it down into achievable components and keep track of each of these components which have been assigned to different teams. This whole activity can be easily represented as a goal on the company dashboard with defined metrics. It can be seen by all employees who can also track its growth, view achievement milestones, calculate their own effort needed to help in progressing each component, and much more. 

In short, a dashboard helps companies take up smaller initiatives that add value to long term company goals and keep track of how every individual effort within the company contributes to this value.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

3. Learning and Development

A centralized employee dashboard can be the sole information source employees can access to advance their career aspirations within the company. Learning paths can be defined with help from senior leaders, progress in learning initiatives can be tracked and achievements can be recognized and rewarded across job levels with the help of a transparent dashboard. 

It is also possible to set up company-wide learning initiatives with specific instructions, standardized learning curriculum, and certifications and this information can be used for future performance and other metric calculations as well.

4. Improve Visibility

When the management evaluates performance, productivity, and other vital business parameters, it is often presumed that employees are left in the dark about the progress made. With centralized dashboards, it is now possible for senior leaders to easily communicate the information down to the lowest levels of job roles within the organization. 

Employees can see visual reports of the company’s growth, performance assessment steps, and percentages of teams, intuitive breakdown of career goals and how they are aligned to performance benchmarks, and so on. This helps to create transparency within the workplace. Employees feel that they are treated and rewarded fairly when it comes to matters such as performance ratings, payment revisions, etc. It also sets a clear path for employees to identify their weaknesses and improve on areas that need focus.

Read more: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

5. Staying Connected

An employee dashboard is not just about reports and charts that give a view of the daily operations of the company. It is more like an intranet portal where employees get together virtually for sharing information, staying connected with their friends at the workplace, exchange conversations, and much more. Organizations on the other hand have a medium to channel content directly to employees transparently. 

Important announcements, events, virtual meet-ups, etc. can all be facilitated smoothly through an interactive and intuitive employee dashboard. When most of your employees work from their homes in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic era, this will greatly enhance their work morale and also create a relaxed working environment that does not allow physical meetups for a long tenure.

A centralized dashboard creates a better working experience for all employees and is vital in creating a highly engaged and motivated workforce. When most employees work remotely, this is a key factor that is hard to ignore for enterprises. Now the question arises as to how to set up this dashboard. This is where Infince can be your solution. 

The comprehensive enterprise digital platform of Infince allows you to create powerful employee management and an operational dashboard that serves all purposes outlined above. Get in touch with us to explore how Infince can be the game changer in your workforce operations.

How can businesses succeed with employees working completely remotely?

One of the major implications of the COVID-19 lockdowns is the shift from an office-based work environment to the remote work mode. Even sectors that had previously taken a cold approach to let their employees work from home have suddenly become flag bearers of the work from anywhere culture. Dynata’s Global Consumer Trends: COVID-19 survey series reveal that the lines between work and home life are getting significantly blurred. The report also says that most people prefer the work from home culture to stay around, at least for some more time. 

In the US alone, nearly half of the working population has transitioned into a completely remote work mode since the outbreak began in early 2020. However, as the pandemic is showing mild signs of receding and vaccine developments are moving into promising trials, the question of whether the remote work culture will prevail for the long term has risen in the corporate boardrooms.

Changing Work Lives in the New Normal

When employees started to work continuously from home, some of the key challenges that concerned senior leadership were productivity, security, and client timeline commitments. However, the trends witnessed across the globe were largely positive in these 3 areas with several organizations reporting that their staff productivity levels were in fact much higher when they worked from home rather than in the office. In Dynata’s survey, 75% of respondents report that their productivity levels are high while at home than they were in office, with considerable travel time saved. 

Read more: How To Build A Highly Productive Remote Workforce

So the question that should really concern the senior leadership is how to succeed in this new normal of working remotely if it is the future of work?

To remain successful while adapting to a long term remote working culture, companies need to make strategic changes in their policies, technology infrastructure, and their cultural approach to ensure that all employees stay united in their objectives while working apart. 

Here are 4 tips that we suggest to accelerate successful operations with a remote workforce:

1. Set up a transparent communication policy

One of the major elements of unifying diverse team members working remotely is through regular communication. Employees need to have a source to continuously engage with their peers, seniors, managers, or even the leadership in the company to address the challenges they face daily as well as gain insights into their work objectives. 

Companies need to break down their legacy hierarchy of communication and create an open environment where even the top leadership executives are available at the touch of a button on an employee’s phone. Leaders need to take their employees into confidence by regularly communicating updates about the company’s growth, business and service performance metrics, initiatives to keep employees motivated, and much more.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

2. Create a specialized procurement team

The challenges in enabling a remote working environment can be solved to a great extent when setting up an effective procurement team to assess, identify and procure relevant technical, managerial, and operational assets required for specific work contexts. When this team gets things done faster, employees gain quicker access to their work assets irrespective of their location. 

For empowering your procurement team, you need to provide them with the right tools for strategic sourcing, managing contracts with vendors for various assets, intelligent reporting, and purchase management.

3. Create a collaboration platform

Enabling a transparent communication policy is only one side of the coin. Investing in a powerful digital platform to enable this communication is the other side. Employees who work remotely need to collaborate with their peers on different work tasks daily. They also need a place to get insights, reviews, and feedback on their work, company objectives, business, and other relevant aspects related to their career. 

This is where a powerful and collaborative intranet portal like Infince makes sense for your business. Remote work collaboration platforms like Infince enable better collaboration, reduce friction on dependent tasks, and support unified goal fulfilment for distributed team members. The platform will also serve as a place where employees can feel reminiscent of their office virtually.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software

4. Seamless Project Management

When remote teams are involved in client projects, there should be a smooth mechanism for managers to oversee projects, give instructions and guidelines, set expectations, and track progress. Only then will the organization as a whole be able to meet commitments made to clients and improve trust in the process. 

For distributed teams, there should be a seamless project management capability via a digital platform that can be used to assign, monitor and track progress of tasks at different levels ranging from individual to teams working on modular components of a project to the entire organization or service delivery unit as a whole. When project management is streamlined, it will facilitate transparent client reporting and improved credibility for your brand.

COVID-19 was a catalyst for a change that is well poised to remain a stronghold of tomorrow’s workforce. The future of work may be changed forever as we know it and to remain successful, companies must rethink their strategies of work from a cultural and practical perspective. 

Read more:  5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times

It has been proven beyond doubt that with the right culture, adequate digital infrastructure, and transparent communication, you can run your business remotely with unified management. The main asset you need is a digital backbone that will connect various units within your business to enable seamless workforce operations and support sustainable growth. This is where Infince can make a difference. Get in touch with us to learn how Infince can help you accomplish success in the new normal of “work from anywhere!”