Why Your Small Business Needs A Cloud Suite Like Office 365

Most small businesses are self-funded and bootstrapped right from the beginning. What this means is that they really do not have the bandwidth to test out various tools and services that could potentially save them money in the long run. Regardless of which industry your business operates in, one software suite that every business inevitably owns is a productivity suite like Microsoft Office or Open Office. With the ability to create documents, presentations and handle large amounts of data through spreadsheets, Microsoft Office virtually owns the productivity system at every small business across the country and possibly the world.

However, this productivity suite does not come cheap. If you are a small business with more than 3-4 employees, the cost of installing an MS Office suite on every computer at work can easily add up to several thousand dollars a year. This is where an Office 365 system comes handy. Unlike the traditional Office suite, Office 365 works over the internet and is priced on a per-user basis. Consequently, depending on the growth of your business, you can easily scale up or down the number of subscriptions you own.

But it does not stop here. Microsoft Office 365 includes other tools and services that are quintessential to the growth of an organization. If your business is signed up with a service like Google Apps for your email solutions, you can away with that by opting for Outlook. If you are looking to build a document management system to collaborate with various clients, you can do away with rudimentary Excel sheets and instead opt for SharePoint in Office 365. If your business requirements include talking to clients from across the world, you could do away with signing up with various third party calling card providers and instead take the free Skype minutes that come with your Office 365 purchase.

Although these are valuable feature-level advantages of Office 365, moving to the cloud offers crucial benefits to small businesses from a business perspective. Here are a few reasons

Scalability : Small businesses typically need solutions that are easily scalable to fit the requirements of business. For instance, during peak seasons, owners may require to hire additional resources on contract basis who may then be terminated during periods of lean business. A cloud solution offers dramatic flexibility for businesses that need fast scaling up or down of their resources.

Reliability : Cloud solutions like Office 365 are often hosted across thousands of servers across the world. Consequently, it is virtually impossible for data from these servers to be lost due to a hack or malware attack. Even during down-times, it is easy to quickly bring the service back online due to the data being stored across multiple servers.

Less Capital Investment : Small businesses work on bootstrapped budgets that cannot afford large capital investment. Traditional technology infrastructure requires the installation of expensive servers and cables at the business end. With a cloud solution, all of this can be easily replaced with a service that is accessed through the internet. These solutions are thus easy to set up and run compared to traditional systems.

With more than 15% of Microsoft Exchange customers already having migrated to Office 365 within a span of 12 months, the future for Microsoft's cloud based productivity suite looks optimistic. Has your business already migrated to Office 365? What are your thoughts as a business owner? Tell us in the comments.

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
This question is for preventing automated spam submissions.