Running a remote business is starting to become the standard rather than the exception to the rule. In the last few years, more businesses have gone remote than ever before.
While some businesses simply allow employees to work from home a few days a week, others have moved their operations entirely online. Either way, having remote workers saves money on large overhead costs, but it comes with a unique set of challenges.
The solution is cloud-based collaboration. If your business hasn’t started collaborating in the cloud, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to increase productivity, efficiency, client/customer satisfaction, and revenue.
Collaboration is a challenge for remote teams
Collaboration has always been one of the biggest challenges of working remotely. With no central, physical office to connect for a meeting, everything has to be done online and it’s hard to keep track of documents, tasks, and projects. Even the best project management software doesn’t always support seamless collaboration.
This dilemma has prompted many tech companies to expand their applications to include tools for collaboration. For example, Box started out as a secure file storage and sharing platform and has since introduced a collaboration tool called Notes.
With Box Notes, users can access files to make edits together in real time, which drastically improves collaboration efficiency. This tool and other cloud-based collaboration tools are game changers.
Cloud-based collaboration skyrockets efficiency
Nothing boosts efficiency like cloud collaboration tools because they allow for real-time collaboration you can’t get with standard applications. Without the cloud, this type of real-time collaboration wouldn’t be possible. The reason real-time collaboration boosts efficiency is simple:
- Real-time collaboration avoids excessive back-and-forth emails, saving plenty of time and reducing labor hours.
- Real-time collaboration avoids having to host a video conference just to get someone’s input.
- Real-time collaboration collects input immediately so it can be compiled and integrated into subsequent documents and projects faster.
Generally speaking, with real-time cloud collaboration, clients and customers are better served because projects are completed faster and more accurately. Also, without so much back-and-forth communication, employees don’t get so frustrated and exhausted attempting to collaborate.
Cloud-based collaboration gathers extensive input
Another benefit to cloud collaboration is the ability to get input from more people than you would without cloud applications. For example, if you have five different teams with ten employees on each team, it would be an enormous task to get their input on something from all of those teams. You’d have to send out multiple emails and wait for responses at the very least.
With cloud collaboration, you can have each team review documents, notes, and other files online and submit their input quickly. They can do it as a team or each individual can review the files and give their input on their own time.
When you’re not using cloud collaboration tools, it might seem too daunting to collect extensive feedback and that might deter you from involving everyone in the first place. Sometimes you don’t need input from every team, but other times it’s essential, as with DevSecOps.
Cloud-based collaboration supports DevSecOps
Does your company use DevSecOps as a standard? If so, kudos to you because this is an essential part of every IT project, especially software development. If you’re running a software development company, without DevSecOps, your applications end up sacrificing security for features or sacrificing features for security when you have to rewrite the application to make it secure.
Using DevSecOps is the only way to integrate security into the entire development process and cloud collaboration supports this process extremely well. For example, your development and security teams can collaborate together in the same space in real-time, which makes it possible to come up with solutions before features have been implemented.
Collaborating on security before code has been implemented is critical because it’s always harder to rewrite code. Rewriting code is always a major setback for any project and real-time collaboration helps to avoid this issue.
Want to boost your business’ success? Collaborate in the cloud
If you’re like most businesses you’re always looking for ways to increase employee efficiency and communication, boost sales, and generate a higher level of customer or client satisfaction. You can accomplish this (and so much more) with cloud collaboration software.
Whether you use cloud-based project management, document collaboration, or anything else, you’ll start to see the benefits quickly. Once your teams get past the learning curve to use the application, they’ll settle into a routine and their increased productivity will have a substantial impact on your business.
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