It’s not just about cutting costs, cloud computing can also help your employee’s
productivity and collaboration levels, even if they’re in pajamas.
Now I know we all heard about Marissa Mayer’s recent ban on Yahoo employees working from home, but she had the data to support her choice. Please don’t take my comment as accordance with her decision, I firmly believe providing employees the opportunity to work at home is an essential policy companies should have.
However, if you’re concerned about eventually experiencing Yahoo’s low productivity levels, don’t fret too much. If you invest in cloud computing platform for your business and equip your employees with the right applications, you will never encounter the mess Mayer had to clean up.
So What Is Cloud Computing Collaboration?
Before I launch into the benefits, some of the ways you can use cloud computing for collaboration identified by BizAnytime.com are:
- Web & video conferencing
- Project, team and client workspaces that are shared and accessible
- Discussion forums
- File sharing and storage, especially large files
- Task management
Cloud Computing Offers 3 Collaboration Advantages
The first two advantages go hand in hand: collaboration Cloud computing is reinventing the collaboration wheel, allowing employees to not only work from home, but also from the beach, or the pool, anywhere. That’s the point. Your employees, using cloud computing, can access critical corporate data from their mobile, tablet, or laptop.
Say someone was working on a PowerPoint for a customer meeting, but went on vacation without their laptop (impressive I know) and forgot to send it to the presenter. That’s got disaster + fire drill + probably a lost deal written on the walls.
By equipping your employees with the right cloud computing tools, the PowerPoint would be stored in a centralized location, accessible by the presenter, or the creator on his mobile device from vacation if there were any needs for updates.
These updates can happen in real-time, no need to download, save, resend; the document can be edited, saved, closed out and accessible to the next person all within minutes.
The third cloud computing collaboration advantage is the speed of updating your applications. As your business evolves, so will your demands on your applications. Before it would take a few years and a lot of headaches to update what you had, but now it can be done quickly and easily.
No matter which cloud you use, public, private or a hybrid. All can fit your collaboration needs. However, if you’re a small to mid-size business with not that large of an IT budget I would stick with the public or a hybrid cloud. You can pay as you go, only for what you use, and not deal with the cost of infrastructure maintenance.
Did I forget anything? Let me know by commenting on this article or bringing the conversation to Twitter @LindseyNNelson.
photo via foliocloud.com