6 Ways Cloud-Based Solutions Can Help You Gain Competitive Advantage
Improved Flexibility
Improve the flexibility of your business operations by outlining the priorities and focusing on them first.
The reason why cloud technology is the preferred course for improving operational efficiency is that it is scalable and easily adopts changes during a project without any additional costs. Furthermore, cloud-based solutions allow user access to information from anywhere and at any time. Even if your workers are located in remote areas or an emergency pops up at some odd hour of the day, they can instantly update the clients with the latest information and seamlessly tackle the situation. The versatility of cloud implies that you can stay connected with your business at all times. Apart from boosting the overall productivity of the organization and the workforce, cloud-based tools also maintain business continuity even when the team members are dispersed in different locations.
360-Degree View Of Business Processes
With cloud-based business applications and tools, you can have a 360-degree view of all your organization's major operations and make improvements wherever needed.
The key concept underlying cloud-based solutions is that it brings all the different facets of a business together on the same platform. This way, organizations get a complete way of their business operations and can exactly identify the areas that can be improved and lead to higher profits. Complete visibility over business data also implies greater control over it and you can easily decide which of them can be accessed by the users. Besides, data standardization also streamlines workflows thereby, eliminating the chances of errors or duplications and improves collaboration.
Accurate Business Insights
A bird’s eye view of your data can act as a strong ground for executing advanced data analytics strategies and generating actionable insights.
With so much data available, companies today have better opportunities of understanding the choices and preferences of their customers. Assessing these pieces of data manually could be very difficult. Nevertheless, with cloud-based business intelligence, you can have tools that automatically collect information, sort the high-quality data and transform them into actionable insights. With all your company’s information recorded at a single source of truth, you can design and implement tracking solutions and build real-time reports to analyse information across the organization and break down data silos.
Quality Control
In order to increase sustainability and be successful in the industry, ensuring that the quality of your services and products are up to the mark is incredibly important.
The success and failure of a business more or less depends on the quality of products it delivers and the customer support system. As all the documents and data of an organization are stored at the same place in a single format on cloud, maintaining consistency, removing errors and recording updates become easier. Furthermore, when these solutions are embedded with technologies like automation and artificial intelligence, the process of setting KPIs and thoroughly matching the quality of products with their specifications is simplified. The systems can automatically spot inconsistencies in the processes and recommend improvements thereby, reducing the downtime.
Automatic Software Updates
Depending on a single platform for running all your business operations instead of multiple standalone applications means automatic software updates and reduced compliance costs.
For enterprises that have a lot on their plates, maintaining multiple standalone applications is not only difficult and overwhelming but costly as well. It is understandable that the updates of all these applications will not be rolled out at the same time. Therefore, companies will have to employ staff who would keep a track of these updates and install them on time. But, with cloud technology, the picture is quite different. Cloud-based tools and applications automatically refresh and update themselves so that the employees are freed up. This saves a lot of time and the resources spent on external IT consultation.
Faster Disaster Recovery
There are a few vulnerabilities that are always out of control no matter how tight your company’s security standards are, and this is where faster disaster recovery is fruitful.
Gaining a competitive edge in the market is not only about producing high-quality products and services. Being prepared to recover the losses as soon as possible after being hit by a crisis is something that matters too. You can have multiple layers of security over your company data but, when it is stored on-premises, there are some vulnerabilities that cannot be steered away from. Although there isn’t much that you can do to prevent these setbacks, there are two things which, if taken care of, will ascertain faster recovery. Firstly, all your company's data should be integrated and stored on an off-premise cloud platform such Microsoft Azure. Secondly, have an emergency recovery strategy prepared beforehand so that important operations do not come to a halt when you are backing up files and data.