With the advent of the smartphone and laptops designed for cloud-based applications such as the Chromebook, use of the cloud has been rising over the past decade. There seems to be a proliferation of cloud based apps for both consumers and businesses. Those who use managed services in Ottawa should review cloud-based alternatives to traditionally locally hosted services such as email exchanges, word processors and accounting software to see if they can improve your business activities.
With the vast number of software packages available, clients of tech support services in Ottawa are almost guaranteed to find a cloud-based software solutions that benefit their day to day business. Presented below are three software suites which include applications for spreadsheets, databases and human resources management to help streamline your processes. This is not a comprehensive list and as always, further reading is encouraged.
G Suite: G Suite is Google’s offering for business cloud solutions. GSuite offers 20 features to revolutionize how companies using IT in Ottawa do business. Many of these features such as Gmail, Docs and Calendar are all too familiar these days, but GSuite offers much more. We know that Docs is a direct competitor to Microsoft Word, but Slides and Sheets are direct competitors to Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel. This means that you do not have to pay up-front for hefty licenses for each machine running Microsofts Office Suite, and the files created using these apps can be accessed from anywhere in the world, on any machine. Another interesting feature of G Suite is the mobile device management software, which can be used to keep data on your mobile devices safe, whether they be company-owned or employee-owned.
Microsoft Office 365: For users of computer services in Ottawa who do not want to stray too far from the familiar, Microsoft offers its entire Office suite in the form of a cloud-based solution. instead of paying for hefty license fees and server hardware and software for Exchange, you can pay a monthly subscription fee and use the staple office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. It’s not just the Microsoft Office Suite though as there are many more features such as Outlooks email, calendar and contact management are incorporated as well. The package also includes Skype for Business for video conferencing and OneDrive for cloud storage which gives each user 1TB of storage. Yammer and other collaboration tools are available in the suite to help teams work remotely.
Zoho One: Zoho One is a software suite that “has all the applications to run your business”. Boasting the largest amount of apps of the 3 suites described here, IT consulting clients in Ottawa are almost certain to find an app or complete solution to positively change their business activities. Zoho one has many applications that stick out from other sites such as Desk, a help desk support software, and Assist, which is used to remotely resolve customer issues. Zoho One has finance software to help keep on top of your record keeping, invoicing, expense reports and inventory. There are many other applications available through Zoho, some are familiar like word processors, spreadsheets, and slideshow creation tools. Others are not so familiar but can be very useful such as Creator which enables you to build apps, to automate business processes so time can be dedicated to core business activities.
Cloud computing is here to stay and will no doubt change how business is done throughout the world. SaaS just provides a small snippet of what cloud computing can achieve for your business in Ottawa. PaaS and IaaS can provide even more flexibility and scalability to your company and help optimize your resources. Next in this series we will discuss PaaS and what it can mean for your business.