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For companies looking for ways to stay competitive and flourish in today’s rapidly evolving business environment, implementing digital transformation is now seen as an essential step. The term “digital transformation” describes the integration of digital technologies into various company operations, significantly changing how the firm runs and provides value to its customers. The process may demand a lot of money and work, but it’s worth it due to the benefits that it brings. In this blog, we will be discussing the main advantages and benefits that digital transformation can bring to your business.
operational efficiency is crucial for organisations to stay competitive and deliver exceptional products and services. Digital transformation plays a pivotal role in enhancing operational efficiency by streamlining processes and leveraging technology to automate tasks. Here are some key points elaborating on the benefits of enhanced operational efficiency through digital transformation:
Embracing digital transformation as a strategic initiative paves the way for operational excellence and positions businesses for success in today’s digital age.
Digital transformation enables businesses to deliver enhanced customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. Through the use of data analytics, companies can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs. This data can then be leveraged to personalise interactions, provide targeted marketing campaigns, and offer tailored products or services. With digital channels and self-service options, customers can enjoy greater convenience and seamless interactions with businesses, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
In an increasingly digital and interconnected world, expanding market reach is a key advantage of digital transformation for businesses. For example, digital transformation eliminates geographical barriers and enables businesses to connect with a global audience. Online platforms, websites, and e-commerce stores provide businesses with a 24/7 online presence, allowing customers from around the world to access their products or services. This expanded reach opens up new market opportunities and potential revenue streams beyond the limitations of physical locations.
It also opens doors for partnerships and collaborations with other businesses or influencers in the digital space. Through strategic alliances, businesses can access new markets, leverage complementary expertise, and expand their reach through co-marketing efforts. Collaboration with digital influencers or industry thought leaders can help amplify brand awareness and tap into their existing audience base, driving increased visibility and customer engagement.
Businesses are able to rapidly make data-driven decisions due to the real-time data and analytics provided by digital transformation. Leaders can gain important insights into market trends, consumer behaviour, and operational performance with access to accurate and current information. Decision-makers are better equipped with this knowledge to react rapidly to shifting market dynamics, spot opportunities, and handle potential difficulties. As a result, companies are better able to adapt and change their plans, remaining competitive in the digital era.
Digital transformation has revolutionised collaboration and connectivity within organizations, leading to numerous benefits for businesses. There are many advantages of this including seamless communication with organisations. collaboration platforms provide a centralised space where employees can share ideas, best practices, and lessons learned. This knowledge sharing fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, leading to innovative solutions and approaches. Additionally, digital tools allow for real-time feedback and brainstorming, enabling teams to iterate and refine their ideas more efficiently.
Digital transformation has also facilitated the rise of remote work and flexible work arrangements. Cloud-based collaboration tools and communication platforms enable employees to work from anywhere, promoting work-life balance and attracting top talent. Remote work also opens up opportunities to hire global talent, further enhancing the diversity and expertise within teams. The flexibility provided by digital transformation tools contributes to employee satisfaction and productivity.
In conclusion, digital transformation offers numerous benefits for businesses willing to embrace the digital age. From increased operational efficiency and improved customer experiences to expanded market reach and agile decision making, the advantages are undeniable. While the journey may present challenges, organisations that successfully navigate the digital transformation process are well-positioned to thrive in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.
Cloud computing, multi-cloud, and hybrid-cloud are all terms we’ve become used to hearing. Now we can add “super cloud” and “sky computing” to the list of terminology that describes the computing infrastructure of the coming decade.
Although it’s hard to believe, given how ubiquitous it is today, cloud computing as a practical reality has only been around for the past decade or so. However, at that time, it revolutionized the concept of IT networking and infrastructure.
In the simplest terms, it involves providing computer storage, processing power, and applications via the internet, so users don’t need to worry about buying, installing, and maintaining hardware and software themselves.
In that time, we’ve seen the emergence of multi-cloud – which involves businesses and organizations picking and choosing services across the multitude of cloud providers – and hybrid cloud, where infrastructure is delivered via both cloud and on-premises solutions.
But technological progress never stands still, and more recently, new terms, including supercloud and sky computing, have emerged to describe what the next stage in the evolution of “infrastructure-as-a-service) might look like.
But what do they mean, and what advantages do they offer businesses and organizations? Let’s take a look at them in a little more depth and examine some of the potential use cases.
Both of these terms, in fact, describe very similar ideas – the next stage in the evolution of cloud computing, which will be distributed across multiple providers. It will also integrate other models, including edge computing, into a unified infrastructure and user experience. Other names that are sometimes used include “distributed cloud” and “metacloud”.
This is seen as necessary because, while many organizations have made the leap to multi-cloud, the different cloud providers do not always integrate with each other. In other words, a business pursuing a multi-cloud may find itself managing multiple cloud environments, with each one operating, to some extent, as an independent entity. This can make it difficult if, for example, we want to shift applications or data from one cloud to another.
The answer proposed by the supercloud concept is to create another abstraction layer above this that operates agnostically of whatever cloud platform or platforms are running below it. This is the supercloud, where applications can be run in containers or virtual machines, interfacing with any cloud platforms underneath.
The result is separate cloud environments that operate as if they are interconnected with each other, allowing software, applications, and data to move freely between them.
This means that a business might have service agreements in place with, for example, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Infrastructure could then be reconfigured on-the-fly through the supercloud interface to move services between these different platforms, or between servers in different geographic locations, as requirements change.
Examples of when this might be useful are when services need to be delivered to a new group of users in a new region or when a particular data center becomes overloaded. The entire application can simply be “lifted and shifted” to a new, more convenient data center or a different cloud provider.
In many deployments, supercloud combines the benefits of both hybrid and multi-cloud, as it also gives access to on-premises infrastructure and other models such as edge computing. The important part is that all of it is accessible and usable through a unified user interface, so the actual location where the data is stored and where the applications are running from is invisible to the user, who always has a consistent experience.
As well as simplifying internal infrastructure, systems, and processes, migrating to supercloud models, in theory, makes it easier for organizations to integrate and share tools or data with their clients and partners, who may be using completely different platforms to them.
Right now, a major challenge when it comes to setting up supercloud infrastructure is security. This is because different cloud providers might have different security protocols, and any data and applications that have to operate across multiple providers will need to be configured in a way that’s compatible with all of them.
Using more cloud services simply means that there are more surfaces where data can be exposed to possible security breaches. A priority for those laying the foundations for supercloud systems will be creating automated solutions that run in the supercloud layer in order to offer protection regardless of what cloud service or on-premises infrastructure is being used.
Fundamentally, cloud computing is designed to be a final stepping-stone on the road to the commoditization of computing infrastructure. This objective is set out in a paper published in 2021 by the University of California, Berkley professors Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker, titled From Cloud Computing to Sky Computing.
Stoika and Shenker were early proponents of the cloud computing paradigm, writing about it as early as 2009. Back then, they predicted that it could lead to compute and storage infrastructure becoming “utilities,” similar to electricity and internet connectivity. This didn’t happen – largely due to the emergence of different standards between different cloud service providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and so on). Supercloud (or sky computing, as Stoica and Shenker prefer to term it) may be the way to finally make it happen.
They do, however, posit that while the technical challenges will be fairly simple to overcome – creating services and standards to communicate between different clouds, for example – might encounter some resistance from the cloud providers themselves.
Will Amazon or Google welcome the idea of “sharing” their cloud customers with competing services? Stoica and Shenker point to the existence of applications such as Google Anthos – an application management platform that runs on Google Cloud as well as AWS and other cloud platforms – as evidence that they might be becoming receptive to the idea.
Altogether, supercloud is an exciting concept that has the potential to make it simpler and more affordable for organizations to leverage powerful computing infrastructure. This has to be good news all around, hopefully making it easier for innovators to bring us cloud-based tools and apps that further enrich our lives.
Source: The Future Of Computing: Supercloud And Sky Computing
A new £2 million hub, co-led by the University of York, has been launched to investigate the future potential of cloud computing.
The Hub, part of a £6m investment by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will bring researchers together to drive innovations in cloud computing systems, linking experts with the wider academic, business and international communities.
The team behind the initiative – called Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed Cloud Computing Applications and Research (CHEDDAR) – believes it is imperative that new communications systems are built to be safe, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable, from the tiniest device to large cloud farms.
Co-lead of the new hub, Dr Poonam Yadav, from the University’s Department of Computer Science, said: “The three communication hubs from EPSRC is a much-needed and timely initiative to bring cohesive and interoperable current and future communication technologies to enable emerging AI, neuromorphic and quantum computing applications.
“CHEDDAR is strongly built on the EDI principle, providing early career researchers opportunities to engage with far-reaching ideas along with national and international academic and industry experts.”
Jane Nicholson, EPSRC’s Director for Research Base, said: “Digital communications infrastructure underpins the UK’s economy of today and tomorrow and these projects will help support the jobs and industry of the future.
“Everybody relies on secure and swift networking and EPSRC is committed to backing the research which will advance these technologies.”
Led by Imperial College London, and in collaboration with partners from the universities of Cranfield, Leeds, Durham and Glasgow, the goals of CHEDDAR are to:
Develop innovative collaboration methods to engage pockets of excellence around the UK and build a cohesive research ecosystem that nurtures early career researchers and new ideas.
Inform the design of new communication surfaces that cater to emerging computing capabilities (such as neuromorphic, quantum, molecular), key infrastructures (such as energy grids and transport), and emerging end-user applications (such as autonomy) to answer problems that we cannot solve today.
Create integrated design of hierarchical connected human-machine systems that promote secure learning and knowledge distribution, resilience, sustainable operations, trust between human and machine reasoning, and accessibility in terms of diversity and inclusion.
Source: Cloud computing hub to launch with £2m EPSRC funding
The old communication methods that we all use and are extremely accustomed to were examined in the first piece, and it was stated why those methods just don’t function as well any more in the contemporary, prosperous world that we are fortunate enough to be living in. They no longer contribute to productivity, make efficient use of time, or fulfil their original intent. A change is necessary at this time.
Communication is unquestionably the most important piece of the puzzle that is your organisation. Regardless of the business you operate in, it is imperative that your staff always engages in effective and professional communication with both your clientele and one another. Customers want to be able to contact you whenever they need to in the modern world because there are no longer any established working hours.
The rest of this piece will go through modern communication tactics that could one day assist you and your team give clients better service.
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. You can make direct calls with VoIP from a computer or VoIP phone from any location. Even if you keep the same contact number that your customers are used to, calls are automatically redirected to various devices. You can pretend to be somewhere even though you are not thanks to this clever trick. We’ll go into more depth about this later.
Using VoIP, you can project a particular image onto your clientele. With VoIP, your employees can appear to be at their workstations while actually being on the golf course, in a coffee shop, or at the in-laws for supper. They are constantly susceptible to some deception. Professionalism is achievable in even the most relaxed circumstances. By using VoIP, you may improve your professional standards to levels they have never been while keeping your customers unaware of any changes in how business is conducted. The same reliable firm’s phone number will still be used, and when someone answers, the standard “Hey,…., how may I help?” will be stated. For your clients, all of this is essential; consistency is critical since it builds their familiarity with and trust in your company as a whole and adds to its success.
Since all conventional phone lines are ordinary phone lines, just one phone number has been issued to them. As you are aware, the Covid-19 pandemic’s ongoing impacts and its suffocating repercussions have surprisingly enhanced the appeal of remote work over the past year or so. If traditional connectivity is still utilised, your staff will need to memorise complex codes and keys to dial so that their device appears as the office number. This task takes a lot of time, and there is a lot of room for confusion and mistakes.
We may all agree that voicemail is an excellent piece of technology, ostensibly allowing us to “never” miss a message, but it is unable to keep up with how we work in the modern office. VoIP is a better option because it allows you to decide where and for how long calls ring. You have complete control over how calls are received; for instance, you may want the first ring to originate from your workplace, the second from your home, and the third from your mobile. This gives you the opportunity to make a very specific promise to your clients: that you won’t ever miss one of their calls.
No of the industry you work in, making promises to clients is perilous. If you make promises to customers, you must be very certain that you can keep them since doing otherwise could harm the reputation of your company as a whole or, even worse, cause you to lose revenue. By having the opportunity to direct your calls to specified locations, you can guarantee that a certain quality of service is delivered. Whatever the circumstance, there is never a reason for business to stop.
Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular business tools today. It is well known for being a major player in the Microsoft toolset. Microsoft Teams was first released in 2017, although it did not initially acquire popularity at the rate it has recently. However, due to the epidemic, Teams has now satisfied a demand that was desperately in need of being satisfied. With an astounding 250 million daily active users, it currently commands a significant global following. Teams is fully integrated into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and makes it simple for your team to share files and organise work (if we listed all of its features, we’d be here all day). By consolidating all of your tasks in one easy-to-use spot, you can do away with internal emailing and lead your business into the future of work.
In the previous article, this was briefly discussed. In order to make room for everyone, meetings have generally been held in a drab office with a crowded staff. This may be the cause of the infrequent meetings that many organisation have had recently. The modern period has made it possible to have effective meeting settings, but that doesn’t even consider how difficult they might be for people who have a somewhat larger staff.
Teams Meetings allow you to choose a time that works for the attendees and instantly add it to their calendars, allowing you to plan a meeting in advance. It is a ground-breaking tool since it completely eliminates the hours it used to take to organise a time that worked with everyone’s busy work schedules. Microsoft Teams eliminates the concern of losing a critical team member or one who travels regularly for work by enabling your team to participate in meetings from any location in the world with an internet connection.
Since using these tools can be scary at first, consultation may be the best option if you don’t think you can do it on your own.
Being aware of how the workplace’s technology landscape is constantly changing is essential if you want your own business to prosper in the current era. You may rest easy knowing that your team is well-equipped with the skills and knowledge essential to not only execute their jobs well, but also progress your company, if you use the tried-and-true tactics that are acceptable for your business.
4TC take time to understand the daily challenges that your business faces. We then provide cost-effective tech solutions to these issues that will help you save time, protect vital data, and enable you and your staff to be more effective with your time management. Utilising your IT to its full potential is essential to guarantee that you and your business can thrive and grow into the future. If you would like to find out more on how 4TC Services can provide affordable tech management to your business, drop us an email or call us now for a full demonstration.
The classic office was permanently gone from the contemporary workplace only a few years ago. It is no accident that our reliance on technology has increased as it has developed quickly. A completely new mode of functioning has emerged as a result of this reliance. We all know that technology will develop and evolve in ways that the majority of us cannot fathom, but are you sure you’re constantly making the most of it to benefit from this evolution?
Any company in the world is free to invest money in the newest technology developments, but certain aspects of business operations must always remain the same. Communication is without a doubt one of the most crucial elements since a successful communication system is essential to the continued survival of every organisation today. The strict requirements of your clients must constantly be followed by all internal and external communication channels.
Our reliance on technology has led to a huge number of businesses marketing their goods as the best communication tools available. Now that we have a better understanding of some existing business communication practises, let’s get a sneak peek at some potential developments that could occur in the future.
Email has steadily become the most significant corporate communication tool. Because it has been doing this since the 1970s, we could say that it is more than tried and tested. It has been successful in connecting the office as well as people and businesses all around the world since its creation. Rarely does technology have such a long shelf life. Email is a miracle, making it arguably the best method of business communication ever. The ability to transfer a crucial communication or document across an entire workplace and halfway around the world, with both recipients receiving it at the same time, was revolutionary in the 1970s. In contrast to today, when instant texting, simple video conferencing, and other technological marvels are ubiquitous, communication techniques were still developing in the 1970s. Though the question is no longer “Wow, how amazing is email? “, but rather “Is email good enough?
While it wasn’t always the case, most of the emails we get on a daily basis these days are simply not valuable enough. In today’s workplace, they are typically ineffective, time-consuming, and distracting. There is no place in business for scrolling through multiple pages of spam to find the vital ones.
Email can be tiresome at times; you might have to exchange messages back and forth for hours before you finally get to the point. Whatever the reason, as we have indicated, squandering time at work nowadays is unpleasant.
Since the phone was first created, not much has changed, and its significance in the workplace hasn’t altered either. Nothing beats interacting with your clients while using your tone of voice and deliberate word choice, as you are definitely aware. These approaches are almost usually much more efficient than sending an email. The phone is still not only the first but also by far the greatest option for a spontaneous encounter that is of the utmost necessity and urgency, even though there are fantastic alternatives for planned business meetings, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Don’t go too far and quit using phones altogether when conducting business. There is just one option left since modern alternatives cannot be entirely rejected: a combination of the two.
It’s time to move on because landline technology is obsolete in compared to contemporary alternatives and can no longer significantly increase business productivity. There are no exceptions; if you want to manage a prosperous modern firm, you must always be reachable. Since everything is instantaneous and there is always someone else offering the same goods or services with the promise of being cheaper or of higher quality, customers are no longer the trustworthy, dependable group they once were. They are now much more erratic than they were before. Does conducting research actually violate morality? In other words, your clients will go somewhere else if they can’t get in touch with you. The worst conceivable way to begin your connection is when a new prospective client tries to contact you but is unable to do so. If you are not constantly reachable by phone for any reason, the connection between you, your suppliers, and your customers may break, which could lead to the failure of your firm.
Meetings are now different in kind. Everyone can recall the days when the boss would assemble everyone in one location around a desk and whiteboard while someone took minutes. Typically, this included a time-consuming process that was repeated repeatedly. It seems sense that since these types of gatherings have a negative past, they are more likely to occur under difficult conditions or when there is a particular motive for them. With the proper technology in place, businesses may embrace a new solution that eliminates the time and effort needed to schedule meetings. Many organisations today may struggle to find a day and time that works for their huge staff.
In the article that follows, we’ll take a closer look at a few of the numerous modern communication techniques that are currently in use and examine how, when used effectively, they can completely transform your business’s communication capabilities and propel you into a much more prosperous future with carefully chosen technology at the core of your company’s success.
4TC take time to understand the daily challenges that your business faces. We then provide cost-effective tech solutions to these issues that will help you save time, protect vital data, and enable you and your staff to be more effective with your time management. Utilising your IT to its full potential is essential to guarantee that you and your business can thrive and grow into the future. If you would like to find out more on how 4TC Services can provide affordable tech management to your business, drop us an email or call us now for a full demonstration.
Employees are constantly bombarded with phishing
Businesses are putting themselves at risk of all kinds of cyber-attacks due to poor practices when it comes to educating and training the workforce.
A new report from Yubico, found less than half (42%) of UK businesses it surveyed held mandatory, frequent, cybersecurity training.
There are many things employees could be taught, which would improve the cybersecurity posture of organizations, the report further suggested. For example, roughly half (47%) often write down, or share their passwords which is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to safeguarding a password.
Resetting the password
Elsewhere, the report found that many workers (33%) allow other people to use their work-issued device, while more than half (58%) use personal devices for work.
A similar percentage (49%) do vice-versa, as well, by using a work-issued device for personal use, which is another cybersecurity red flag. Finally, half (48%) have been exposed to a cyberattack such as phishing, without reporting the incident to their IT and cybersecurity teams.
Even when an employee gets exposed to a cyberattack, their organization does very little to amend the issue. “Very few” companies implemented phishing-resistant cybersecurity methods in response to being targeted, a third (28%) simply had their passwords reset, and just a quarter (28%) were made to attend cybersecurity training.
“Cyber attacks, and how to prevent them, should be top of mind for every organization. However, our research reveals a remarkable disparity between the risks of cyber-attacks and businesses’ attitudes toward them,” commented Niall McConachie, regional director (UK & Ireland) at Yubico.
For McConachie, businesses should deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA) as soon as possible, and consider FIDO2 security keys. The latter “have been proven to be the most effective phishing-resistant option for business-wide cybersecurity”, he says.
“By removing the reliance on passwords, MFA and strong 2FA are more user-friendly and can be used for both personal and professional data security. This is especially important as cyber-attacks are not limited to companies but can directly target customers and employees too.”
One of the most used-used passwords – “123456” – is still in use today, despite being known by virtually every cybercriminal out there, the report concluded.
Source: Lack of cybersecurity training is leaving businesses at risk
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