Are your customers ready for remote work? This article will look at what tools and services cloud resellers can recommend to their customers for a successful and productive remote work environment and seamless transition from a traditional office-based environment.
How you can enable your customers to work from home
In light of recent events, many organisations are looking at remote work as an option to ensure their business continuity. Few organisations are prepared for large-scale remote work, so cloud resellers can take steps to make sure their customers have the tools required to make the experience productive and profitable for both employees and their organisations.
Useful cloud tools
Microsoft is offering a wide range of cloud solutions designed to be widely accessible, which are leveraging communication and connectivity between users. By moving to the cloud, your customers can easily access documents, data, and information from anywhere.
Teams is Microsoft’s virtual workspace that has seen the highest usage growth recently, for its collaboration functionality. It works across all devices and with IM, group chat, online meetings, calling, and web conferencing, users can stay in touch easier than ever. Built into Office 365, it makes it simple to collaborate, share and edit documents. Teams users also benefit from end-to-end security, admin control, and compliance. Teams is the perfect tool to keep a business connected. With the ability to hold conference calls with up to 250 people, it makes it easy to switch in person staff or customer meetings into an online call to reduce business disruption.
For communication outside of their organisation, customers can opt for Microsoft 365 Business Voice, a modern cloud-based telephony solution that integrates into Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. It offers calling together with chat and meetings in a single app that users can access from anywhere.
SharePoint and OneDrive are powerful intranet solutions that empower organisations to store business documents in the cloud to collaborate, share information, and use applications from anywhere to keep employees productive. With these two services, staff can share documents, data, resources, and news securely and efficiently. Using lists and libraries alongside Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, users can easily create rich experiences with forms, workflows and customise apps.
With Azure, organisations can move their infrastructure to the cloud. This is a great opportunity to increase accessibility, save on operational costs and scale for business growth. In addition to this, Azure is built on a secure foundation, with built-in controls to customise data management.
Get your customers ready to work remotely
Some of the services mentioned above are included in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages, meaning your customers can get access to many tools for one monthly cost. As well as the business essential applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, these packages empower employees from all size organisations to work anytime, anywhere and on any device.
You can help your customers by reviewing what IT solutions they currently have in place and whether their employees could still access their data from home and collaborate if needed. Basic email solutions such as Exchange Online will not be enough, here are a few options you can offer to your customers to help enable them for remote working.
| Office 365 Business Essentials | Office 365 Business Premium | Microsoft 365 Business | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft RRP per user per month | £3.80 | £9.40 | £15.10 | |
| Host email with a 50 GB mailbox and custom email domain address. | ||||
| Create a hub for teamwork to connect staff with Microsoft Teams. | ||||
| Store and share files with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. | ||||
| Host online meetings and video conferencing for up to 250 users. |
Security for home working
Microsoft has many inbuilt features that ensure security is present and robust within the cloud environment, resulting in a secure way to work remotely from any device. Check out the top 10 ways to protect your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 environment here.
To ensure you are correctly configured for home working, Microsoft has a dedicated portal to help you ensure that an environment is as secure as possible based on the deployment. Learn more about the best way to increase security here.
Ultimately Microsoft has a wealth of features and benefits to ensure your workforce is secure and productive, allowing you to empower your workforce to work from home.
Find out more
If you would like to find out more about these solutions or need any help getting your customers ready for remote work, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our intY Cloud Sales Specialists are more than happy to assist you.