NOW WHAT? WHAT’S NEXT!

Over the past month PayLab Plus has engaged in the conversation of “What is the Cloud Anyway”! History of Cloud Technology, Security, Compliance and Characteristics.  Today many SMBs have unlimited possibilities to compete and play in the game and on the court with growing their business migrating to the cloud.  So not to bombard you with a long step by step because I get you want to get on with your day here is the first of many “What’s Next”….

KEY QUESTION #1: WHAT IT CAPABILITIES DO SMBs NEED?

BUSINESS-GRADE EMAIL – Given the importance of email in the context of overall corporate communications, choosing a business-grade email provider is arguably the most critical communications-related decision that SMBs can make.

VOICE SERVICES – A number of SMBs, particularly smaller ones, use mobile phones or residential lines as the initial telephone interface for incoming calls. This is especially true for companies that cannot afford a full-time receptionist and an on-site PBX to manage and route incoming calls.SMBs should implement a business-grade PBX capability that includes a number of key features, such as an automated attendant that will enable callers to route their calls to the appropriate department, extension dialing, voicemail delivered to email, and find me/follow me functions that will permit calls to be routed to individuals’ mobile phones if they are out of the office.

REAL TIME COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION – Another important capability for most SMB users is real-time communications and collaboration in the form of instant messaging and online meeting capabilities.

SECURE FILE-SHARING CAPABILITIES – An important capability for any information worker is a way of transferring files efficiently—and, preferably, independently of email.

BACKUP SERVICES– The ability to backup data on a regular basis to protect against data loss is absolutely essential for any organization. Best practice for corporate backup of email and other data stores includes regular backups, as well as geo-redundancy – the backup of data to multiple, geographically separate data centers. This will ensure that a natural
disaster, fire, power outage or other disruption in one data center will not destroy customer backups or impede their ability to recover data from them quickly.

DISASTER RECOVERY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY – Continuous access to email and email data stores is critical. Outages of even a few minutes can create numerous problems for individual email users, as well as the business processes that rely on email as their transport infrastructure. Email systems that do not operate as close to 24×7 as possible cost organizations in a variety of ways, including the loss of employee productivity, time lost in resolving email outages, lost business opportunities, and a variety of less tangible consequences, such as damage to a company’s business reputation.

WHAT’S NEXT?…How do SMBs implement these services? I look forward to being with you next week. Be productive and successful!