How Cloud Computing Makes Enterprise Mobility Possible

Like most business owners, you probably understand how important it is to keep your company on the cutting edge, whether it’s with technology or adopting new strategies. Whatever the case, right now, one of the biggest trends in the business world is enterprise mobility. It refers to the practice of ditching the traditional office for allowing employees the freedom to work from practically anywhere. More and more, we’re seeing people get hired despite the fact that they’ve never even met their employer.

However, if you plan on introducing enterprise mobility to your company, make sure that you’ve done the same with cloud computing already. The cloud allows an employee to access any file or internal system from just about anywhere on the planet. In this way, it is fundamental to the idea of allowing your staff to go mobile.

There’s no debate in that regard. If you aren’t leveraging the cloud, enterprise mobility is going to come back to haunt you. It will prove far too clumsy to be considered a solution and could actually put your business at risk in a number of ways.

Fortunately, the cloud comes with all kinds of benefits that make mobile employees an even better bet.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a small squad below you or an enterprise with an entire battalion behind you, the name of the game is attracting new business. Doing so takes time and money, though, which means trying to get new business is actually quite the investment.

Cloud computing can reduce this investment considerably though. With this virtual environment, it’s far easier to put together prospectuses or even whole product lines to test with a new customer. Instead of trying to use the same approach on every single prospective client, you can customize your approach. This doesn’t just mean better pitches, it means you can open up whole new markets too.

Having mobile enterprises is all well and good. However, think about taking on business partners as well. Traditionally, doing this can be a challenge, mainly because it’s difficult to get your hands on all the relevant information your partner may have to offer. Doing this through email tends to be sloppy and piecemeal. The same issue presents itself with mergers and acquisitions too.

The cloud makes this a simple task though. Again, you have a shared, virtual environment where you can drop the relevant data for your partner and vice-versa.

Any resource that will make it easier for your company to scale is definitely one you should look into. The more efficiently your organization can scale, the more customers you can take on at a moment’s notice, the more services you can provide and the more markets you can hit. No one wants to face the reality that their company could have much larger revenues, but will have to forego them because they can’t scale up fast enough.

Likewise, sometimes scalability is the only way to save your business from going under. Perhaps you overextended yourself or it happens that a change in the economy you couldn’t have predicted has left you overleveraged. In any case, the only way to avoid going out of business may be to scale down as quickly as possible. The cloud will allow you to do this better than any other resource.

Best of all, when you get past the crisis, you can get right back up to your old size in no time.

In the past, enterprise mobility usually meant spending a good deal of money at first. After all, your employees need all kinds of hardware and software installed to do their jobs properly. While it may be an investment that eventually pays off, many companies were uncomfortable with the initial demands.

Nowadays, though, thanks to the cloud, you can easily leverage mobile employees without having to spend a small fortune for the benefits. Like we mentioned in the beginning, many in your position will never actually meet some of their employees in person anymore.

When it comes to something as vital as hosting, the economies of scale again work to your favor. You can get as much support as you need and then decrease it when necessary.

Another reason some companies put off working with remote employees is because they fear that their efficiency will take a hit. They know that, in the office, they can just call a staff meeting whenever necessary.

With the cloud, though, it’s so much easier to share documents, work together on projects and monitor employee work. If you need to speak to your team face-to-face, there’s always Skype.