Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is today considered to be the responsibility of an organization as a whole. Earlier, it was merely seen as a focus area of the HR department and several small companies did not have a clear vision about employee engagement and how it can impact their growth. All they did was organize a few monthly fun activities in the office and expected employees to be motivated on their own to return to work every day from their homes. But times have changed and studies have shown that teams with greater engagement levels show profitability levels 21% higher than the rest. 

Your small business, irrespective of the domain in which you operate, should include workforce engagement as one of the key pillars of growth. Only when your employees show dedication and passion to contribute to building valuable experiences for your customers, will your business achieve desired levels of growth. If you are still wondering how, here are 5 ways in which employee engagement can instill more growth for your small business enterprise:

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

1. Better Research

As a start-up or small business, every aspect of your operation is critical. People handling each department needs to be aware of the fundamental rules in building great customer experiences through their individual focus areas. 

In a small business, there may not be many avenues where employees can be offered training sessions on improving and incorporating best practices in their individual roles. They need to take up research and learning exercises to improve their competence on their own. To do so, they need motivation and this is exactly what employee engagement initiatives can bring to the table. When employees are engaged, they will feel energized to try out new innovations in their field of operation. They will research it, find out best practices and seamlessly drive value from implementing the practice in their daily routine.

2. Ownership and Responsibility

Startups and smaller businesses often face the challenge of meeting bigger expectations with fewer resources. As such, the workforce in such scenarios will have to be autonomous to a great extent. They need to make decisions on assigned tasks with authority and in most cases without supervisory monitoring. For this to happen, employees need to be empowered enough to take ownership of the tasks assigned to them. 

Each component of your business should be run by the respective employee as if it were their own business unit. Such a high level of commitment and sense of ownership comes only if people are recognized and engaged at work. When they have seamless work experience along with the right enablers to help finish their jobs faster and with more efficiency, employees will demonstrate ownership of their activities at a bigger scale. This will positively influence the way customer service is delivered through your business channels leading to better revenue potential in the long run.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

3. Talent Retention

Studies show that in the United States alone, the cost of losing an employee is above 15,000 dollars. This is the turnover cost incurred for replacing them with a similarly skilled worker. As a small business owner, hiring and retaining the right talent is often a tricky perspective considering the fact that the options available for a potential candidate are numerous. If you have found a good talent, then it is best to retain them and use their skills to nurture your business. Here is where employee engagement can add to the retention experience. 

By enabling a comfortable working environment with autonomous decision-making freedom, you can empower workers to explore their talents in all possible ways. Benefits such as healthy work-life balance, recognition of work done and seamless career progression options can improve engagement levels of employees. This will, in turn, make them stay with you for a longer period thereby saving you from bearing a huge talent replacement cost in the long run.

4. Boost Profitability through Increase in Productivity

When employees are engaged, they perform better and with more efficiency leading to higher results and productivity levels in the organization. Global consulting firm Wyatt Watson reports that companies that paid attention to employee engagement initiatives were able to generate 26% higher revenue per employee. 

This increase in productivity will reflect in your business growth as well. When more value can be contributed by each employee, the overall profitability of the business scales up. This is a win-win situation for everyone.

5. Improved Collaboration

In every workspace, irrespective of the team size, one of the biggest drivers of growth is team bonding. “Unity is Strength” is a motto that every business must incorporate in its work culture. By bringing on-board powerful employee engagement platforms that enable seamless collaboration between your employees, small business players can drive better results through teamwork. Modern technology solutions like Infince enable team members working from anywhere in the world to organize meetings, share files, work on a project together over virtual workspaces thereby enabling faster fulfillment of customer service. 

When everyone in the team is engaged, they will be willing to help each other with individual tasks and go the extra mile to support colleagues who may be facing challenges. This generous effort of teamwork will reflect positively in the brand value your small business propagates to the outside world.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

Workplace engagement is a key driver of growth in today’s highly competitive market for small businesses. Entrepreneurs need to have a dedicated vision to improve engagement levels within the company and enable a better working environment for each employee. Here is where cloud-based platforms like Infince can be the game-changer for your organization.

From creating powerful intranets that enable enterprise-wide communication and collaboration to file sharing, Infince can help drive an engaging culture in your organization. Get in touch with us to explore how to keep your employees happy, engaged and motivated to come back to work every day.

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

For every small business today, the key to success lies in empowering their workforce to work together in the best possible way to deliver value to customers. This is true irrespective of the industry that your business focuses. Studies show that nearly 39% of employees feel that people in their organization do not value the importance of collaboration. Team collaboration is all about bringing everyone on the same page. But it is easier said than done. For small businesses, you have the benefit of having to bring fewer people into the same wavelength, but the core challenges of collaboration like communication, transparency, and accountability need to be addressed as much as what bigger players do. So how can small businesses improve team collaboration and promote a culture of continuous employee engagement in their work environment? Here are some tips:

1.Create a Unified Vision

To foster a culture of collaboration, it is important to ensure that all your employees work to achieve a common goal. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a powerful vision for the organization and then seamlessly connect the end objective of every project or work your company undertakes, to this vision statement. This will ensure that irrespective of the team or project an employee is a part of, they will work towards achieving the common goal as defined in the vision. For example, if the vision is total customer satisfaction, then every effort your workforce puts in can be seamlessly translated into steps taken in achieving maximum customer satisfaction. This vision statement or concept can be used in the awareness sessions to help team members bond with each other, understand their responsibilities and realize the need to be accountable for one’s own actions so that the collective effort of the team is successful in the end.

Related Reading: The Office Of The Future – 5 Innovations To Know

2. Smarter On-Boarding

It is often found that new joiners in a company or in a team face difficulty in getting acquainted with the culture and nature of work in the first few weeks or months in the company. This is predominantly due to weak onboarding policies at small companies which pretty much focuses on sharing a couple of PowerPoint slides about the company and expecting new joiners to automatically align themselves with the goals and culture prevalent. Instead, companies should cultivate a smarter onboarding experience by getting rid of boring presentation sessions and documents. They should instead, pair newcomers with an existing team member who can guide them into the company’s routine and help them adapt faster to the culture prevalent in the workplace.

3.Ensure Effective Task Management

There are many instances where employees need to collaborate and work together on projects. In today’s highly competitive talent market, some of these employees may be remotely located as well. Small businesses need to invest in empowering your resources to collaborate efficiently over tasks irrespective of where they are geographically located. Using a powerful platform like Infince, your business can ensure there is a virtual space for employees to work together and with accountability for each action. Such platforms allow you to monitor task progress, enable smooth interaction between colleagues, facilitate the exchange of files and documents related to work and much more. Managers can efficiently manage their team with improved transparency and unbiased decision, thanks to insights from such employee management solutions. The end result is better team collaboration and improved productivity levels in the organization. When tasks and people are brought under a common technology framework, it keeps employees organized, managers aware of their team’s progress and clients happy about fulfilled commitments on delivery.

Related Read: Infince – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

4.Encourage Transparent Communication

A key driver of team collaboration in any business environment is open and transparent communication. Only when people strike a comfortable level of conversation with each other, do they develop mutual respect, trust, and understanding for their colleagues. For organizations, there are several ways to encourage a culture of open communication. A big part of the exercise involves mentoring managers to promote a healthy atmosphere for open communication and not a culture that works by just giving and obeying orders. 

It is important to bring technology into the picture here to work as an enabler for open communication. Most of the organizations typically use just an email system for employees to communicate. However, employees need more than just a simple email system. Bring on-board a powerful intranet system with social media-inspired virtual news spaces for sharing news and information about the company, activities, and events planned and much more. Employees can express their responses for such intranet posts similar to what they do on social media like Facebook. Another option would be to have a good instant messenger system where employees can converse with each other in real-time for a better understanding of problems and scenarios.

5.Promote Socializing Outside of Work

Every employee in your small business has a side of talent, skill or ability that can help them create healthier conversations and relationships with others. As an organization, you need to create avenues for employees to socialize and celebrate their individual and personal skills. Team building exercises, lunches, dinners, and sponsored team vacations or holidays where employees can get to know their colleagues better are just a few ideas to use. This will enable them to build better working relationships in parallel and stand up for each other in collaborative tasks with more responsibility and trust.

Team collaboration is vital to ensuring the continuous growth and success of every small business. Having the right vision, the most relevant business processes and the best technology is the way forward to achieving excellence in team collaboration. Get in touch with us to see how Infince can be the game-changer in enabling a collaborative and productive work culture within your organization.  

Why Small Businesses Need to Invest in SaaS Delivery Model

The widespread adoption of Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model of technology deployment is undoubtedly a key driver of digital disruption across industries. Studies show that the global SaaS market is expected to touch or exceed a staggering USD 623 billion by 2023. And the biggest beneficiary of SaaS across every industrial sector is small and medium businesses operating in these sectors.

While big players do have their own key advantages, it is the smaller players who can truly transform their business. With SaaS, they get access to powerful tools that can enable them to compete with the best in the business without worrying about costs. With SaaS, they only need to pay for the resources they use, can scale up or down depending on business needs and enjoy hassle-free technology deployment without dedicated monitoring staff. This allows them to offer the best of services to customers using the same digital solutions as used by leaders in their industry.

Still skeptical about making the SaaS switch? Here are 5 reasons to transition your small businesses digital infrastructure into a SaaS model:

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

1.Save on Costs

As a small business, you need considerable investment in core business processes and resources like for example, inventory for a retail business. There isn’t too much scope for spending heavily on IT projects if your core business is not technology related. But you need the best of digital solutions to serve the savvy and demanding consumers of today. Here is where SaaS-based software can be your best friend.

SaaS solutions typically work on a subscription basis, where you pay for what you consume: be it storage, computing power or number of users. And most cloud software is available for ready deployment with easy customization to suit your unique needs. This enables small business players to use world-class software without worrying about hefty license fees and implementation costs.

2.Flexible Infrastructure

By infrastructure, we mean the technology back-end of SaaS solutions that can accommodate any fluctuations in usage patterns. For example, a retailer may see increased use of technology services during peak holiday seasons. This scenario may require extra storage space or computing power to process transactions faster and deliver constantly seamless customer experiences. If you were to have an IT infrastructure on-premises, then jacking it up to meet the extra demand would involve a Herculean effort. Not to mention, the cost overhead for extra capacity, which may find a use for only a few days or months every year.

In a SaaS model, small business owners need not worry about scaling their technology infrastructure in pace with the demand from consumers. SaaS providers offer easy scalability and managed services to ensure that your technology rises up to the occasion when it’s needed. This flexibility empowers small businesses to focus on improving their business processes while trusting their infrastructure to run on its own risk-free.

Related Reading: Why Should Your Business Invest in Cloud Native Digital Technology?

3.Access to Innovations

Today, every successful business, across any industry relies on powerful technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics and so on to serve customers better. As a small business, you may not have the financial muscle or technical skill to build and use such technology in your daily operations.

However, with SaaS solutions, the story is completely different. SaaS vendors continue to invest heavily on incorporating market innovations such as AI, machine learning, etc., to enable their solutions to deliver more value. When you subscribe to their solutions, your business stands to automatically benefit from using this technology from day one.

4.Zero Maintenance Effort and Cost

Unless your small business opts for a private cloud infrastructure hosted on your own servers, you are less likely to incur any costs of maintaining your SaaS solutions. There is no need for dedicated staff to monitor availability or conduct periodic maintenance of hardware. All these would be managed by the SaaS vendor themselves and you only have to pay for the subscription plan you opted. This can be extremely useful for small players as they can control IT costs significantly and channel their savings into their core business.

Usually, all SaaS vendors commit to near 100% availability for their services and for cases of technical downtime, they usually notify customers well in advance to be prepared for any disruptions. Not having to hire technology professionals to run these solutions enables you to recruit more talent having niche business skills to grow your business.

5.Faster Deployment

SaaS software usually goes live in a matter of minutes for small businesses that have no or minimal customization requirements. Once up, any incremental changes or new feature additions can be rolled out without causing any disruption to the customer’s business processes that rely on these solutions. Vendors can roll out these updates at any convenient time without having to disrupt the customer’s business operations and without having to involve stakeholders from the customer’s side for every deployment. As a business owner, you can sit back and relax while new features get added seamlessly to your digital solutions faster and with more robustness.

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

SaaS is the future of small business technology as evident from the high rate of adoption it has found globally. The large plethora of benefits that customers get to enjoy while subscribing to powerful SaaS solutions with significantly low investments on cost and effort is a key driver of this adoption trend.

All you need is a strategic technology partner to enable the best value from your SaaS investments by offering you a powerful solution and tailoring it to suit your unique business needs. This is where INFINCE can be the game changer in your journey. Get in touch with us to know how your small business can leverage the power of SaaS with INFINCE. 

6 Tips to Ensure Secure File Transfers Within Your Organization

To survive tough market conditions like dynamic consumer trends and rising competition, businesses continuously invest to set up new and innovative digital frontiers that enable them to offer superior end-user experiences. The movement of enterprise systems to the cloud is perhaps the biggest driver of the digital transformation of today’s business. However, the growth of digital capabilities has resulted in more volumes of data generated across the operational landscapes of businesses. This data includes everything from your environment’s conditions, to sensitive customer data. With a large number of employees deployed to work on this data for delivering more valuable insights, a key security challenge that comes into the picture for enterprises is file sharing. There is so much focus on this area that studies predict a market size of over USD 10.94 billion for enterprise file sharing and synchronization by the year 2023. 

So how can your organization ensure that file sharing is seamlessly enabled for your workforce while safeguarding data integrity and protection requirements? Here are 6 tips you can consider implementing in your organization:

1.Improve awareness

The first step in creating a secure file sharing environment within your organization is to make sure that everyone knows the risks involved when confidential information goes out of their business systems and into the wrong hands. Surveys have shown that over 95% of staff working in an office can access data from their organization which they do not actually require.

So, to ensure that sensitive information doesn’t go out of your organization into the wrong hands, employees need to be constantly educated about the fallouts that occur due to data leaks and also how to efficiently share official files without inviting risky security threats. Carry out periodic learning sessions for all employees on best practices in file sharing, invite experts in to deliver lessons on file-sharing conventions and take precautions to ensure that your employees do not commit mistakes that turn up as big blows with regards to sensitive information leaking during file sharing.

2.Keep your business systems up to date

Security threats evolve by the minute if you look at what is happening in the market today. Leading solution providers for your business operational systems like CMS and other file management systems often release security updates every now and then to counter newly identified threats. It is important for you to keep these systems up to date and incorporate suggestions and recommendations given by service providers from time to time to keep out security threats and prevent mishandling of sensitive data during file transfer or exchange operations.

Related Reading: What’s Involved In Renewing An SSL Certificate?

3.Implement a holistic security management system

While most organizations have some form of security assurance applications deployed across their IT landscape, it often has supervisory control over just a few areas like email or FTP alone. When you select a security solution, it is wise to opt for an integrated suite of security systems that offers comprehensive coverage for all your enterprise information access and exchange points like email, file management, content management systems, hardware ports, and so on.

This will offer effective monitoring of all enterprise communication points and will guarantee more secure file sharing mechanisms and prevent leakage of sensitive information. Such solutions also offer permission-based access control for enterprise information repositories with robust tracking of who accesses what at which time. This will prevent any deliberate attempts for data breaches due to the fear of being exposed during regular security audits.

4.Use cloud-based systems for file exchange

Eliminate the use of hardware devices like USB flash storage disks and drives for copying data within the enterprise. Provide effective cloud-based file transfer solutions that enable employees to seamlessly and securely access organizational data from anywhere with proper monitoring and logging of activities surrounding this data access. If your organization continues to permit the usage of USB based storage hardware, then there may be instances where organizational data copied into these devices may get corrupted or fall into the wrong hands if the employee loses the device or carelessly manages its usage.

Related Reading: Mitigating The Top 5 Challenges Of Cloud Integration

5.Promote encryption techniques

The best way to ensure that sensitive information is protected during file sharing is by encrypting such information. Be it on online file exchange tools or hardware devices, there are several solutions that encrypt information and make it unreadable for any unauthorized party who tries to access the data at any time.

Powerful algorithms can safeguard data integrity by ensuring that only stakeholders with the right encryption key can unlock sensitive organizational data and this data access is properly logged and monitored by the enterprise security software deployed across your business systems. This will ensure that there is accountability for every file-sharing activity that goes around in your business and can deter insecure practices to a great extent.

6.Conduct periodic security audits

It is important to review your organization’s data and information flow system on a regular basis to keep track of incidents that are dangerous to maintaining the integrity of sensitive information. Check back on channels and workflows that have reported data breaches in the past due to file-sharing activities and see that these scenarios were never repeated and security policies are strictly followed. All relevant metrics related to data flowing throughout the organization need to be reviewed periodically to identify any unusual outflow of data through any channel. Such a practice will deter any attempt to deliberately misuse organizational data and ultimately avoid repercussions from the customer’s side.

While the above tips can empower your workforce to seamlessly and securely facilitate file transfer activities within your enterprise, having a holistic cloud-based enterprise content and information management system can eliminate these risks to a great extent. This is where Infince can be the game-changer for your business’s digital ambitions. With integrated security, powerful information access controls, and seamless content management, your data stays secure with Infince, while you deliver results for your customers. Get in touch with us to know more.

War: Should you go with AWS or Azure to build your apps?

Recently, businesses are in a frenzy to spruce up their technology capabilities to venture into new digital offerings that today’s consumers are increasingly demanding. The strain on traditional IT products and infrastructure has tipped its saturation point with extensive demand for unlimited scaling capacity and robustness. This has led to several innovative development paradigms that shift the technology load from in-house teams and infrastructure to ready-to-deploy offerings in the cloud. One such initiative is a serverless architecture for developing technology offerings. In simple terms, this architecture uses a cloud-enabled system as the underlying server for all technology development. There is still a server in the picture, but companies do not have to endure the pain to develop and maintain it. They only need to pay for what they use of the server.

Related Reading: 5 Advantages of Adopting a Cloud-Native Technology Infrastructure

The biggest advantage of going for a serverless architecture for application development is the speed and scalability it offers to engineers to build enterprise management systems as opposed to the traditional software development models, where it takes a long time to develop enterprise applications. Moreover, using a cloud-based server gives you geo-location-based advantages of faster user experience and lowered cost of operations and remaining compliant to regulatory authorities with regards to data security policies in a new market. 

Now that the competitive advantage of utilizing a serverless architecture for application development is explained, it is time to pick a platform to build your own. There are several leading players in the market for serverless computing but the biggest battles are often fought between Amazon and Microsoft with their “Lambda” and “Azure Functions” offerings respectively. So how do you pick a winner from these two titans? For a realistic evaluation, let us have a look at how these two offerings fare with the 3 most vital parameters of a serverless architecture namely:

• Developer Support
• Performance
• Cost

Let’s examine each in detail to see who comes out on top in becoming the preferred choice for serverless architecture-based development.

Developer Support

This is an area that your technical workforce will be more concerned about. Both these platforms offer support for a wide variety of programming languages even though Azure has more focus on Microsoft’s own line-up of programming languages in addition to JavaScript, PHP, Python, and languages compiled along with it. AWS, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive language support capability that includes Java, Python, Microsoft’s own language families, PHP, and much more. 

Being in a state of continuous evolution, both providers will add support to newer programming languages in the future and the slight advantage that AWS has here may wear off over time or remain just marginally above Azure. As for support from the providers with tips and guidance in developing applications using the varying technology, languages, both these providers offer world-class experiences with very little space to tilt the balance in either’s a favor.

Related Reading: 5 Expert Tips for Effective Cloud Migration

Performance

Large enterprise application suites, when developed on a cloud-based serverless architecture call for high performance in terms of concurrent executions of functions in batch. When we look at the official figures obtained as of the date when this blog was published, Azure offers unlimited executions concurrently but restricts the time for a single function to just 5 minutes and for 10 minutes for an extra cost. AWS, on the other hand, restricts concurrent execution to 1000 functions but offers a significantly higher execution time of 15 minutes for each function. Translating these into business-specific performance terms, we are looking at two providers basically offering an ideal performance guarantee for enterprise applications. If one offers more handling capacity for functions the other offers more execution capacity for each function. Businesses need both these on a balanced scale in the long run as technology deployments often need to perform in a mixed pattern during peak seasons and off-seasons.

Cost

No matter how advanced a digital solution or technology innovation may seem to be, the ultimate choice for a business to investing in any technology will see a major influence coming from the pricing side of the solution. Serverless architecture for application development is no exception in this regard. The inherent benefit of Pay-As-You-Go of cloud computing applies to providers in the serverless computing space as well. Both AWS and Azure, offer subscription-based pay per request plans for businesses that want to utilize their storage and computing environments to build applications on the go. As indicated by their official pricing handles today, AWS and Azure, offer almost identical pricing models pegged at an average of around USD 0.000016 per GB second after their respective free-tier usage has been exhausted. AWS offers a marginally lower cost of USD 0.00001667 per GB second, but in heavier loads, Azure compensates this margin with slightly lower prices. Both bill memory and storage as bundled with the usage which makes either of them way more affordable than Google’s offering where memory and storage are billed separately after requests are billed at an almost identical rate as these two.  

It is hard to offer a solid conclusion of who wins this battle of serverless computing providers as the differences are very marginal. Ideally, everything boils down to which development environment an organization feels more comfortable to use. Either way, if your core business is not technology development, it is advisable to trust a reliable cloud partner to help build your technology ecosystem on the cloud utilizing the best practices of cloud deployment which includes serverless architecture. This is where enterprises can trust reliable cloud platforms like Infince to build world-class enterprise applications in a cost-effective way. Get in touch with us to know more.

Top Must Watch Trends in Enterprise Video Conferencing

In an office environment, a meeting is scheduled often to not just communicate information, but as a means to establish, nurture and prosper relationships- both new and existing- between all involved stakeholders. This calls for a better solution for conferencing than conventional telephone and audio conferencing solutions. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay in today’s dynamic workspaces where technology facilitates remote working from anywhere in the world. The added benefit of sourcing talent from across the globe for your unique needs and not having to spend on physical infrastructure to accommodate them is a boon, especially for small and medium enterprises. Video conferencing offers far higher levels of engagement and collaboration opportunities when compared to other employee communication channels. So what will video conferencing enable for your workforce today?

Here are 5 trends in the workplace that find seamless adaptability with the aid of video conferencing.

1.Accountable Remote Workforce

As mentioned initially, today the large millennial population in the workforce has made the demand for remote work options quite high. Employees want to work out of their own comfort with more freedom than a typical office environment. As for employers, they are left with no option but to allow this flexibility for hiring the best talent to enable their growth. This is precisely the area where video conferencing can bring in the most impact. Today, successful organizations manage their remote workforce efficiently through video conferencing.

Team meetings and presentations involve live video streams from every employee location to ensure that all team members are present and aware of their roles and responsibilities. This is the next best thing to having everyone in a single room and sharing their responsibilities in front of the large group. So the video collaboration platform that is deployed across your enterprise requires a transparent login and access control policy that will ensure participant interactions are tracked and logged for future reference.

2.Smaller and Smarter Meeting Rooms

When you have fewer employees in the office and more on a remote basis, the need for physical meeting spaces diminishes inside the office. However, meeting rooms need to have, smarter equipment to ensure that team meetings conducted over video conferencing can be efficiently executed. Proper projection screens or televisions, audio, lighting and camera infrastructure that is able to vividly capture and present video streams for everyone involved in the meeting are an absolute necessity.

For remote working staff, they need a simpler solution like a mobile app which allows them to easily join the video conferencing stream and share information with their peers. While choosing your video collaboration platform, ensure that it offers all these levels of flexibility that will enable all stakeholders to seamlessly engage in video conversations.

Related Read: Why should a small business opt for INFINCE?

3.Content Sharing Platforms

In addition to enabling every team member to see each other, video conferencing platforms need to provide the ability to share files and other content in accordance with better compression and security policies to ensure lower bandwidth consumption and safer data transmission. This is vital for remotely working employees as they often have to collaborate with their peers in office for reviews and clarifications on their work in progress which may be files, documents, etc.

Your video conferencing solution needs to take into account the desired storage and streaming requirements for file sharing as well as the capability of doing so from even a mobile app. With flexible content sharing ability, employees will be empowered to work better from anywhere as they already have an efficient video communication channel which is also a powerful collaboration system as well.

4.Cloud-Enabled Video Conferencing

For small and medium businesses to remain competitive and cost-efficient in the market, they need to have flexible spending and management ability for their IT infrastructure. Video conferencing being a part of this infrastructure needs to follow a similar trend as well. This is why enterprises need to focus on cloud-based video conferencing solutions like INFINCE that offer easy scalability and better cost efficiency when they need to dynamically scale up or down their usage patterns over time. Additionally, adding new capabilities to your video communication and collaboration infrastructure is easier when it is cloud-based and depending on your needs, the most appropriate pricing plan can be easily configured.

5.Unified Communications

If your core business is not technology, then having to manage a host of solutions for team management and communication like video conferencing, audio conferencing and other intra-organizational collaboration will be a difficult activity requiring considerable workforce effort. This is where unified communication platforms make a difference.

They allow employees to easily switch between communication and collaboration channels on the go depending on their convenience. This will certainly improve productivity as employees are not forced to shuttle between various apps during a conversation. Enhanced collaboration would also enable teams to quickly arrive at decisions and enable work to be done collectively and within stipulated timelines.

Video conferencing is an irreplaceable communication channel for today’s organizations if they aim to build a robust and reliable work culture both in-house and with their extended remote peers. It will be best to have a scalable and cost-efficient technology backbone in your organization that will offer solutions for management, video conferencing and integrated employee collaboration all the same place.

By seamlessly, enabling businesses to build their technology infrastructure on the cloud, INFINCE is the right choice for a better workplace in your business. From providing powerful collaboration and IT deployment options in the cloud to facilitating highly engaging video-enabled collaboration, INFINCE can be your businesses best bet for digital transformation. Talk to our experts to know how your business can utilize the power of INFINCE.

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.

Why Is The Public Cloud A Better Digital Transformation Option?

A decade ago, only a fraction of large scale enterprise applications, as well as consumer-facing applications, were in the cloud. Today, everything, from video and music streaming services to enterprise systems like ERP resides on cloud-based platforms. The large scale disruption that occurred due to the widespread adoption of cloud computing was the transition of one-time expensive licenses for software into highly affordable and flexible usage.

The benefits do not end with just cost but also the improved scalability that organizations were able to enjoy when their business or transaction volumes fluctuated during peak and non-peak market conditions. This is precisely the reason why the enterprise SaaS market is generating revenues of over $20 billion in a quarter for software vendors with a 32% year on growth. Industrial sectors ranging from banking to healthcare, retail, utilities, public services, and manufacturing have all made massive strides in cloud technology adoption. In fact, studies have shown that one-third of all IT budgets from enterprises now go into cloud solutions and platforms.

So cloud computing is here to stay and grow. The question now is what type of cloud, enterprises should invest in to ensure that their digital aspirations are offered the most compatible and progressive growth platforms. The major cloud options available for enterprises are public and private cloud systems. So what exactly are these? Here’s a brief explanation:

Private Cloud

A private cloud system is one that resides purely within an enterprise IT infrastructure and managed comprehensively by their own in-house technical team. From the deployment of applications to maintenance and upgrades, every activity that happens on such a cloud environment is owned, controlled and managed privately by the enterprise themselves. In short, the enterprise builds its own controlled cloud environment for internal usage and restricts any external access.

Public Cloud

A public cloud system is one in which your data and or applications reside on a cloud platform provided by reputed cloud vendors. The vendor is responsible for managing the data center requirements such as storage, application development support, processing and computing power, security and other infrastructural requirements.

So how can enterprises decide on choosing what’s best for their business? Let us examine the top 5 parameters every enterprise must evaluate before selecting their cloud infrastructure and how public and private cloud systems fare in each of these parameters.

1. Security

Every modern-day organization has to deal with truckloads of data that needs to be processed for decision making across different departments. When this entire process is transitioned into cloud-based systems where data is communicated over the internet, then security is a key concern. If an organization were to build their own private cloud infrastructure, then they would have to invest heavily on fortifying their cloud environment from threats. They could argue that external threats are lower than in the case of public cloud systems, but the effort involved in deploying and managing security protocols especially physical security of data centers is humongous.

Besides the right knowledge on how to thwart different levels of threats that arise in the industry from time to time will be limited if you engage internal staff to handle these security issues. As for a public cloud system, they would be aware of how to manage and neutralize the latest threats in the industry. In addition to that, the advantage of dedicated physically secure data centers, public cloud systems offer cloud infrastructure in your desired level of security preferences.

2. Technical Workforce Requirement

If your core business is non-IT, then the number of staff required to maintain a private enterprise cloud ecosystem within your business would be considerably larger if your business deals with a sizeable volume of IT transactions. This workforce requirement spans across different categories of IT technical staff like network administrators, physical and cyber security experts, database management teams, application maintenance and environment support teams, etc. Having a large dedicated IT workforce would result in significantly higher manpower requirements for a non-revenue, operational stream within your business and hence could impact staffing requirements across other key functions gradually due to budget constraints.

Additionally, your in-house technical team may not have access to industry awareness sessions and workshops that dedicated public cloud service providers offer to their staff. Hence, they would not be in a position to handle complexities that may arise from time to time. Public cloud service providers, on the other hand, invest in R&D, training and learning sessions to keep their workforce aware of what’s new and innovative in their industry. By preferring them over your own private cloud infrastructure, the knowledgeable workforce requirement challenge is mitigated considerably.

3. Scalable Infrastructure

Today’s businesses need a flexible technology infrastructure that can handle large fluctuations in their consumer demands and market conditions. For example, if you are an online retailer, then your technology backend will witness massive loads during the holiday shopping season and hence may need to scale up bandwidth, storage, computing, and analytical power, during this season. If you have private cloud infrastructure, then scalability will not be a flexible advantage since it would involve upgrading your own hardware infrastructure as well as other platform strengths to handle surges in usage.

Maintaining this high level of operational infrastructure all through the year is an expensive affair since the surge may be restricted to just a few months, but the hardware maintenance needs to be an ongoing activity all through the year. This is where public cloud systems offer an on-demand scalability advantage to your technology infrastructure. You can increase your cloud environment, performance, storage, and computing power in times of sudden business spikes and transit back to normal usage levels once the peak usage period is over. This will result in huge savings in terms of cost as well as management of cloud infrastructure as you only need to dynamically manage requests for increased transactions and not have the infrastructure boosted up always.

4. Ease of transitioning

Migrating your legacy on-premise system to a cloud-based platform is not a cakewalk activity. It involves careful planning, strategizing and prioritizing of business functions that need to be migrated to a cloud-based platform. If you are to building a private cloud system for everything, then the overheads involved in project management, application development, data migration, hosting and ultimately the availability of the system for consumer-facing business operations will be a challenging one.

If you opt for ready to deploy public cloud systems on the other hand, then all it takes is your data to migrate into the new cloud ecosystem after a small personalization or customization exercise. Or if you want to transition your proprietary enterprise applications in a cloud environment, then again the stability and support offered by public clouds can in no way be matched if you were to build a private cloud ecosystem to facilitate the transition.

5. Cost of Operations

The cost factor is a culmination of all the above parameters mentioned in this blog. As you can witness clearly, a private cloud requires quite a big investment to ensure that the organization’s technology infrastructure is on a secure and scalable cloud ecosystem with skilled and technically competent staff. This investment is not a one-time activity because technology evolves over time and you need to constantly transform with the changing technologies. With a public cloud system, you only incur the subscription cost while all other management and periodic feature upgrades are intelligently handled by the vendors themselves without passing on a heavy cost to users. This would mean that your organization would be able to significantly lower IT investments and hence core business operations would receive a higher budget allocation.

Related Reading: Migrate to the cloud efficiently! Check out our free guide to enable effective cloud transformation.

Thus, a public cloud system is the most feasible solution for enterprises to transit their digital assets into a cloud ecosystem. As more and more technology vendors bring newer innovations in the form of cloud-based ready to deploy platforms, it becomes easier for businesses to concentrate more on their core operational matters and less on their IT investments. With an infinite cloud platform like INFINCE, transform your business into a truly digital enterprise. Get in touch with us now!

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.

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