Remote work is taking a front seat, and companies need to shift from traditional workplace norms to an on-demand workforce that is changing the business world completely. To make this shift, companies need a digital workplace solution. These integrated and intelligent remote work platforms provide exciting new ways to increase employee engagement, optimize costs, and create an agile workforce. 

What is a digital workplace? On the face of it, a digital workplace may seem like a virtualized proxy of the in-person office space, but in today’s competitive and technology-enabled world, it needs to do so much more.

A digital workplace platform offers cloud-native technologies that improve the company’s bottom line and lead to better team collaboration. It also leverages digital tools that help companies achieve scale while reducing costs. 

Deloitte describes the digital workplace as encompassing “all the tools and technologies people need to get their work done in today’s workplace – both in operation and the ones to be implemented.” Deloitte’s report outlines one characteristic that makes a great digital workplace solution. A good digital workplace platform connects the employee experience with business outcomes.  

Read more: Why Does Employee Well-being Matter in a Hybrid Work Model?

Why Your Company Needs a Digital Workplace Solution

Digital workplace solutions give companies a competitive advantage by making them agile, flexible, and providing them with a centralized management view. In the shift to a remote work culture that is now the new normal, companies need to go beyond generic tools for remote work. Instead, they need to look at a digital workplace solution that integrates processes and leverages digital technologies to help companies improve their profits. There are many reasons why your company must rely on a digital workplace solution.

• Provides real-time collaboration and productivity tools: Productivity and collaboration tools are crucial for remote and hybrid work. Productivity tools like smart email management tools, collaboration channels, and task management apps can help companies complete more work in less time and strategically plan their workloads and business strategies.   
• Improves employee experience: Digital workplace solutions put employees at the center of their design, making team members feel engaged even though they work remotely.  
• Offers unified custom dashboards: A good digital workplace solution provides tools like interactive, data-rich dashboards that give a unified view of all the end-to-end processes. 
• Reduces costs and drives profitability: Digital workplace solutions reduce organizational and management costs. They can increase productivity, which impacts the bottom line. This survey by Gartner reveals a 44% rise in employee productivity. Thanks to collaboration tools. 
• Promises transparency and data security: With their business dashboards that provide an additional layer of data security, digital workplaces offer better transparency and prevent data theft.  
• Drives innovation and scalability: Digital workplace technologies will drive innovation by enabling companies to hire from around the world. They will also help companies scale and increase productivity due to their feature-rich collaboration tools. 

Read more: How to Keep Your Remote Teams Connected

The Best Ways to Improve Your Digital Workplace Management

In the aftermath of the pandemic, remote work is the new reality of an on-demand workforce. A company can have many productivity and collaboration apps but without a digital workplace management strategy and platform to unify them all, there can be information and collaboration overload.  

Here’s how you can improve your digital workplace management.

• Prioritize a single pane of glass view: Digital workplace management brings this unified view of the entire company’s workflows. A central point of control is important. With it, you can leverage advanced levels of automation to make collaboration better and faster. Unified dashboards lead to faster workflows and greater scale.
• Aim for seamless integration: Digital workplace solutions are invaluable only if they are completely integrated into the company’s overall business processes. Digital workplace management helps companies achieve this single point of integration.
• Choose smarter data analytics: To improve your digital workplace management, focus on actionable data and people analytics. Intelligent collaboration tools can give you real-time updates about projects and employee performance. It is not just important to have data but to mine and utilize it immediately. Use custom dashboards to track performances and processes. These dashboards can also give you immediate access to company-wide data from APIs, apps, and CSV files.
• Look for personalized digital solutions: Choose digital workplace solutions that suit your company and its specific requirements. This is where digital orchestration platforms come in. They blend into your company’s existing workflow and optimize it instead of disrupting processes. A digital orchestration platform helps you integrate software and solutions from various SaaS vendors to manage and scale your digital workplace.
• Pick the right tools: Choose digital workplace tools that drive higher rates of automation and collaboration. Digital workplace solutions should be designed to drive end-user adoption, leading to an agile digital workplace. Look for rich interactive collaboration tools like live chats, multiple screen sharing, breakout rooms, and shareable meeting links. Go with productivity apps with excellent project management capabilities and tools to track performance and tasks. 
• Give importance to the employee experience: Employee experience is central to the success of your digital platform. Opt for voice and video calls to build stronger workplace connections so that employees don’t miss face-to-face interactions. Employees value flexibility in remote work and tools like live chats, collaboration channels, and intranet platforms that keep social interactions alive. 
• Choose a centralized IT management: When your company runs multiple applications and has to juggle between many sign-on, work becomes tedious and difficult to manage. With a single sign-on and an efficient third-party tool integration, centralized IT management unifies all of the enterprise’s applications and workflows. It also increases business transparency. 

With the rise of remote work, sustaining a distributed workforce and empowering it with a solid digital workplace management solution is important. InfinCE integrates online and offline communications by providing all-time access from anywhere in the world. While most digital workplace tools offer a variety of tools, some of them like InfinCE, are purpose-built to provide unified reporting of company workflows and targets. InfinCE also provides companies with excellent data accessibility and multiple modes of effective collaboration. Its features include customizable dashboards built to mine data and generate metrics. Want to create powerful and profitable digital workplaces that help you race ahead of the competition?

Schedule an InfinCE demo today or talk to our experts!

The COVID-19 outbreak caused a variety of instabilities across the globe, especially for businesses. Enterprises rushed to think of alternative options to ensure their survival. This led to the rise in the adoption of various forms of technology in every industry. Shifting to the enterprise cloud platform emerged as one such effective solution, which allowed businesses to ensure the smooth running of their operations.

Businesses that struggled to operate due to high operational costs, variations in the supply chain, and fluctuations in logistics after the pandemic are now able to function smoothly with the help of cloud-based architecture. Yet again, while there are myriads of benefits to adopting an enterprise cloud platform, choosing the right one is not that simple. Firstly, you need to ensure that the cloud solution you choose is the perfect fit for your company by evaluating its cost, security, flexibility, and application complexity management.

Read more: Choosing the Right Digital Workplace Software for Your Company

Different types of Enterprise Cloud Solutions

While thinking about an enterprise cloud platform, it is worth noting that there are three different types to choose from – public, private, and hybrid. Each of them varies in its capacities, strengths, and features. Here is a quick look at how the cloud platforms differ from one another.

Private Cloud

As the name indicates, private cloud infrastructure is designed for a single organization. All its components like software and hardware resources are owned and managed by the business. Some well-established organizations even develop their own cloud architecture, while others hire reputed cloud service providers to administer the cloud infrastructure and its resources for them. In either case, the entire cloud platform is exclusively used by a single entity.

Public Cloud

Unlike the private cloud, public cloud platforms allow multiple subscribers to use their resources, and it can be any number of users depending upon the cloud service provider. In the public cloud architecture, the third-party provider manages the infrastructure and its computing services, which are accessed by organizations on-demand over the internet.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud model combines both private and public cloud services to give you the best of both worlds. This allows businesses to manage confidential business data on the private cloud while deploying less sensitive applications and workloads on the public cloud. Moreover, the workloads can be moved between cloud solutions as per the needs of the business.

Read more: Why Should Modern Enterprises Rely on Private Cloud Platforms?

Devising the right strategy to choose a Cloud Infrastructure

If you do not make the right choice about the type of cloud solution for your business, it could incur more costs when managing it. Therefore, you should do a proper case study of your business requirements to see which enterprise cloud platform caters to your demands aptly. Some quick points to consider while developing an enterprise cloud strategy.

Control

If you are going to assign the workloads across your organization over the business cloud platform, you need to ensure that you have complete control of the dashboard. At the same time, if you are not fond of managing the cloud resources and the infrastructure and do not have an in-house IT team for that either, then going for managed cloud services would be the better choice.

Workload

Hybrid cloud gives you more flexibility in terms of dividing the workloads between the private and public cloud. Simultaneously, you can also scale the resources and shift between platforms when the costs fluctuate. This means having a well-planned strategy to ensure effective management of the cloud resources when the need arises.

Security

Ensuring optimal data security is crucial for every business, especially for those that deal with confidential customer and client data like payment records and financial details. That is why it is essential to do a thorough assessment of the compliance and security policies of the cloud before adopting the solution for your organization.

Operational Costs

If you are a small-scale business starting to use an enterprise cloud platform for the first time, then it might be quite challenging to determine which one would be a cost-effective solution for you. Yet again, it is important to consider the operational costs of the cloud platform and ensure that you can bear that without any hassles.

Application Complexity

Each type of cloud solution has varying degrees of complexities around handling the IT infrastructure. Therefore, you should evaluate how to integrate the cloud solution into your existing processes to ensure effective deployment. Likewise, you should also consider whether you would be using it for legacy applications or server-less workloads to devise the right strategy.

Flexibility

Being a business owner, you cannot always expect the same amount of customer responses every day. It may be relatively low on some days, while it may turn unbelievably high on other days. So your cloud environment also needs to have the flexibility to respond to these variations. This is another reason why hybrid enterprise cloud platforms are growing in popularity these days.

Read more: What is Hybrid Cloud Identity and Why It Matters for Your Business

Why is it essential for enterprises to move to the Cloud?

Enterprise Cloud Platform is not a new concept; it was introduced in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the first-ever enterprise cloud storage service. However, over the last decade, the enterprise cloud has rapidly become an innovative solution for businesses that look to future-proof their operations and drive efficiency. Within the short span of about 15 years, the enterprise cloud grew to be an essential asset for all kinds of businesses, with security and flexibility being the main driving forces for its adoption.

In today’s business environment, where every piece of information is stored in digital format and shared among concerned parties via digital channels, data security is a concern for all. Being exposed to cyberattacks would certainly damage the reputation of the business, not to mention the financial losses it can create. This is where enterprise cloud platforms like InfinCE can help with their robust security features and allow organizations to bolster data security.

In addition to providing specific tools to monitor and ensure high-end security, enterprise cloud also allows organizations to have a reliable disaster recovery plan. So even if adversity strikes, be it a service outage or a natural disaster, you can rest assured of getting things back on track quickly when all the essential data and services are managed on the cloud. Meanwhile, migrating to the enterprise cloud platform will also pave the way for innovation and trying new things at minimal expenditure.

The success, efficiency, and end result of adopting an enterprise cloud service invariably depend on many factors. Yet, the scenarios mentioned above and points would help you to formulate a practical strategy and make an informed decision for your business. So, to make the next move for your business, talk to our experts today!