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

Why should a small business opt for Infince?

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

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

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

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

How to Deploy Infince in your Business

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

Collaboration Tools in Infince

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

Applications – On Purchase

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

How will Infince Help your Business?

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

Collaborative Work Environment

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

Automated Planning and Scheduling

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

Digital Asset Management

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

Server Properties

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

User management

• User permissions and roles
• User Roles
• User Groups

How to Manage Tasks using Infince

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

Related Reading: A Guide to Effective Cloud Migration

Who Will be Benefited Most Out of Infince?

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

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

The cloud offers a host of benefits in terms of cost-savings, speed, efficiency, improvements, and more. However, unless the migration is done right, much of the benefits of the cloud do not realize, and worse, the disruption may make the enterprise dysfunctional without anything to gain in return.

5 Expert Tips for Effective Cloud Migration

To help you empower the best of cloud, here’s a checklist for efficient cloud migration.

1. Determine the Reasons for Migration

Migration to the cloud because everyone else is doing is an exercise doomed to failure. Identify a pressing need for migrating to the cloud, or specifically be clear of the gains to be achieved through migration. The benefits could be process efficiency, cost savings, ability to serve customers better, ability to operate from a wider geographical footprint, or anything else.

Perform an objective SWOT analysis of the possible benefits, disadvantages, opportunities, and threats, of the specific asset migration, before committing to the exercise. Migrating to the cloud entails a lot of investment in time and resources, would also cause a disruption to the entrenched ecosystem of the company, and force a learning curve on the employees. Unless the benefits, at least in the long run, outweigh the investment, the enterprise is better off with the status quo.

2. Assess the Environment

Having committed to the migration, decide on the specific applications to be migrated. Not all processes benefit from migrating to the cloud, and many legacy apps or software is best left on the on-premises servers. For instance, it may not be a wise decision to migrate or replace a performance-intensive legacy app that works fine.

Having identified the apps to be migrated to the cloud, analyze the infrastructure used by such apps, in terms of the storage consumed, the data generated, the resources required for Big Data analytics, and so on. Provision for any required enhancements. Next, identify a suitable cloud environment with compatible resources, and determine the architecture needed for the migration.

Migration may be shallow cloud or deep cloud. Shallow cloud integration, also known as “lift-and-shift” entails moving the on-premise application to the cloud, with little or no changes except whatever is required to run the applications in the new environment. Deep cloud integration entails modification of the application during the migration process to leverage key cloud capabilities such as auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing.

Another consideration is opting for a simple, single provider or for a multi-cloud approach. The latter approach, more commonplace, involves splitting applications over multiple cloud providers or developing in a cloud-agnostic approach.

Many enterprises underestimate the migration costs. Costs vary considerably, depending on the nature of the applications being migrated. For instance, costs for applications that constantly run vary greatly from costs for applications that spin up and spin down upon completion of the job. For example, in AWS On-Demand instances, subscribers pay for computing capacity by per hour or per second, depending on the instances run.

There is also the option or private cloud and public clouds. Public clouds keep costs low, but may offer only limited levels of latency and security.

3. Select the right cloud provider

Identifying a migration architect responsible for planning and completing all aspects of the migration, and taking all decisions and a technical plan is essential and should be one of the earliest decisions after committing to migration.

In most cases, it becomes essential to rope in an external partner who has specialized experience in cloud migration. Make sure the selected partner is capable of meeting the architectural requirement, has redundant servers to ensure near 100% uptime, and offers flexible plans to scale-up and scale-down resources on demand. Pay special attention to the SLA and the support capabilities of the selected provider.

4. Execute the Migration

The cloud migration process culminates with the actual migration of resources from the legacy on-premises legacy server to the new cloud server.

Chalk out a migration plan, which details the timeline and methodology of the actual file transfer. The key steps in the migration plan are:

• Lay down the order of migration of application and data.
• Schedule the time of migration, while causing minimal disruption to company operations. Schedule the migration during the night, or when operations are at a lull.
• Back up the data on existing servers, and make sure the backup is easily retrievable if the need arises.
• Set up the cloud environment. Provision the cloud servers and connections and test all the individual components.
• Finally, transfer the data.  Enterprises have the option of making the actual switch all at once or move a few customers at a time. Migrating the first data load will invariably take some time.

Post-transfer, test all the connection again fully and ensure the system is up and running. Make sure all the migrated data is present and available, and the environment is secure.

The migration process may not be entirely smooth and straightforward. Several potential issues, both anticipated and unanticipated, could emerge as roadblocks. Take all possible precautions to counter such eventualities, and be ready to make impromptu changes and tackle any unexpected issue that emerges head-on. An open line of communication with the customer support team of the selected cloud partner helps.

5. Monitor the New Environment

The migration process does not end with the transfer of files. Issues may flare up in the cloud environment as the apps are used, and as such it is important to set up a dedicated monitoring system for a while, to identify and fix any potential issues.

Migration to the cloud may force some changes to end-user processes. Employees may have to be trained on the new method and a slowdown taken cognizance of during the learning curve. Any changes to customer-facing processes may have to be explained through blogs, emails or other documentation.

Another important post-migration consideration is resource optimization. The cloud is optimized for dynamic resource allocation, and as such, plan for distributing resources to applications rather than continue with allocating resources statically.

The above steps are only indicative. Each enterprise is unique, and the best approach to migration depends on the company’s infrastructure, environment, incumbent procedures, and future requirements. To experience a smooth transition with cloud, sign up with INFINCE today!

District Hall, 75 Northern Ave., Boston, 6pm April, 2019:

On 4th April 2019, INFINCE is sponsoring a free workshop targeting the tech needs of small industries. The workshop to be held in the District Hall of Boston aims at preparing small business owners to beat market challenges with available technology options.

In today’s world where market competition is intense and customers expect a faster response, businesses are striving to enhance their efficiencies by turning into “internet companies”. However, numerous factors like limited budget and lack of tech awareness restrain a majority of the new and growing business owners from transforming digitally.

Considering these hurdles, INFINCE has pulled together this workshop to help growing businesses make better technology decisions for rapid industrial growth. The workshop will present ways to organize a firm’s IT options in the most cost-effective and streamlined manner.

“In today’s world innovation is no longer an option but a necessity. The workshop aims at leaving attendees well informed on choosing the right digital options to solve their prevailing business situations and prepare their whole organization for a remarkable future”, says Stephen Cummings, Senior Vice President, Fingent.

Focusing on better preparing small enterprises to accommodate growing technology changes, this workshop will walk small business owners through the many do’s and don’ts of digital transformation. The workshop will be a technology guide for those small businesses who are taking their first step towards a technology future to battle immense market competition. After the workshop, those interested will be able to have a hands-on introduction to INFINCE, a new platform designed expressly to provide small business owners control over their digital capabilities now and in the future.

For free registration sign up at: https://www.infince.com/request-demo

About INFINCE

INFINCE is cloud technology optimized for small businesses and a platform to run IT without any hassles. Stephen highlighted some of the key traits of INFINCE that makes it different from other cloud platforms. Quick deployment is one such, where a company can set up and run INFINCE within minutes. INFINCE is also economical as it integrates optimal cloud configurations that cut down cost without sacrificing on performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Domain Name

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

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

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

The Conventional Hosting Route

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

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

Ready-Made Templates

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

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

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

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

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

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

WordPress Website

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

Creating a WordPress website is a 3-step process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Slow Website Loading and Navigation Speed:

Enterprises pay a very heavy price for slow loading websites.

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

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

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

2. The Challenge of Maintaining Uptime:

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

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

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

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

3. Challenges of Providing Scalability

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

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

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

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

Successful web hosting providers:

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

4. Security Challenges

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

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

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

Web hosting companies may overcome the pressing security challenges by:

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

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