The concept of remote working is not a new one; but, in the fallout of the Covid Pandemic what was once the exception is well on its way to becoming the norm. And Cloud computing has played a key role in enabling this transformation.
Inherent Cloud characteristics, such as location-flexibility, anywhere-anytime access to storage and applications, improved collaboration and data security, are largely responsible for the growing ubiquity of cloud-based workspaces.
Survey after survey, and you can conduct your own empirical study to verify this, has shown that an unusually high proportion of employees would even quit their jobs if their employer moved back to traditional workplaces. It’s not just employees, employers too are becoming increasingly enamoured of this new virtual workplace, thanks to benefits like cost savings, improved collaboration, higher productivity, and better data security.
Remote working benefits for businesses and their people
Freedom from expensive real estate
Remote working has removed the need for businesses to invest in expensive commercial real estate. With the ability to access data, applications, and systems from anywhere and at anytime, there is no need to tether employees to physical offices. The traditional argument of data security too holds little water now, as use of cloud native desktop virtualisation services means data is not stored on any local device, substantially reducing security risks.
Even businesses considered moribund, like banks are eyeing the benefits of enhanced agility, cost optimisation, reliability & security to let go or downsize their physical office spaces in favour of the fluidity that cloud brings. The cost savings this involves is in fact helping many businesses stay profitable even in this economic downturn. And their success is bound to see many more businesses choosing to go the virtual route in an effort to slash their overheads and weather economic storms.
Freedom to collaborate
The big argument trotted out by traditionalists in favour of physical offices used to be that collaboration, brainstormings, etc. called for face time. Cloud storage and the growing number of cloud based work-apps has changed all that. It is now de riguer for team members to collaborate virtually and in real time. The immense data storage and processing muscle that cloud brings, allows many people to work on the same document, access the same files, at the same time. It also means that businesses are no longer tied down to employing talent from a fixed radius. The cloud has removed all these restrictions, paving the way for exponentially improved efficiency and productivity, which in turn promises shorter timelines and better results.
Freedom from interruptions
Cloud-based working also improves continuity, i.e. in the event of any physical disruption, businesses can continue working from anywhere, as long they have access to the internet. For instance, traditional back-office customer service set-ups required employees to take calls at their desks. This is no longer necessary. A cloud based call centre frees customer support employees/agents to field calls from anywhere, plus with the added juice of AI, the call experience is bound to rise even higher.
A real instance of this is when Teleglobal helped a large international co-locational datacenter standardize their entire contact centre solution by incorporating common call flow, with the added benefit of a feature rich CCP, with components for all actions from retrieving information from the CRM to updating fields and call texts. The transformation enables our customer to deliver an enhanced customer experience with personalized with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) from customers across the world, cost effectively.
Freedom from limited processing power
The cloud today is a powerful, processing behemoth, extensively scalable and capable of conducting heavy and complex processing tasks. Cloud environments are built to store, analyse and process massive amounts of data very quickly—an increasingly critical need as more and more intensive processes go digital.
A real life example of this is when Teleglobal was engaged by a large national organization whose on-premises IT setup was struggling to cope with the huge inflow of SCADA data (supervisory control and data acquisition) and generate timely multi-dimensional reports for the management and stakeholders. This was affecting their response time to fix customer issues, and it was compromising service quality and costing the corporation significantly.
To eliminate the bottleneck, we utilized our expertise as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Partner to transfer raw data to AWS cloud storage, where it was processed (cleansing, transformation and loading) in seconds as compared to the hours it took earlier. In addition to speeding up the reporting, we reduced the corporation’s data storage expenditure by almost half using AWS’s a pay-as-you-go model.
Future of work
There is no going back; the future is digital—and it’s here to stay. In order to flourish, it is imperative that companies leverage cloud solutions to acquire more and deeper data insights, raise collaborative efficiencies, improve agility and lower costs. As certified partners to AWS, Azure and GCP, Teleglobal is helping make this happen.