Inflation, wars, ongoing pandemic effects, and political environments all have an impact on how you optimize your operations—even if you run a small business.
If you’re like most business leaders, you’re looking at these factors and seeking to make a plan. Technology is going to be a part of that plan no matter where you are in your digital transformation. Luckily, there are powerful technology solutions available to help you maximize your resources while still growing your organization.
Below, we’ll look at some of the ways technology can help you overcome concerns about tightening budgets, understaffed scenarios, and maintaining profitability.
Consolidate Solutions
One of the ways you can begin to cut costs across your business is by reducing the number of technologies and vendors you work with. It’s a common problem today for businesses to be working with dozens of software solutions. As many organizations have onboarded software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other cloud-based tools, their IT environments have become stacked. Consolidating these solutions is a smart place to begin to reduce or eliminate redundancies and their associated costs.
But how do you remove redundant solutions without disrupting your business or losing services you need? The answer is to select an all-in-one offering. Microsoft 365 famously encapsulates every aspect of business operation within its family of solutions, so you can still run all your business functions but from one vendor only.
When your IT department has just one vendor to manage, you’ll optimize the time your IT staff spends wrangling multiple providers, troubleshooting multiple solutions, and updating multiple versions of software. You’ll get a simplified IT environment that reduces time-consuming work for IT staff—giving them back their day to contribute to high-value work and drive forward organizational goals.
You’ll also streamline many operational needs such as internal team collaboration with just one technology vendor. Employees that have a single solution for productivity needs, collaboration, and security don’t have to toggle among software to complete a project. Instead, they find they can work faster while one solution becomes the cloud in which they work.
Support a Hybrid Work Environment
One of the keys to doing more with less is having the right staff on hand. When you have highly specialized, talented, committed people, you’re better able to sustain periods of disruption and your business is generally more resilient. But attracting and retaining that talent is its own challenge.
73 percent of workers saying they want flexible remote work options, according to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2021 Annual Report, and the last few years have shown that many workers will actively pursue other career opportunities to fit their job into their lifestyle—not the other way around. In order to support your growing business with lean staff, you need to be set up to offer work environments that are attractive to modern employees.
Microsoft 365 allows your teams to access documents and files from any location on any device, securely collaborate, and get more done faster in the cloud. From meetings to chat, phone, scheduling, project management, analytics, and more, Microsoft 365 helps you address the administrative complexity of running a hybrid work environment with all these capabilities on just one platform. Microsoft’s family of solutions is designed to support the modern hybrid workplace—giving you the ability to broaden your search for the right talent across the globe.
You’ll also be ensured of the security of your talent through Microsoft’s hybrid cloud environment that governs employee identities, secures devices, and allows IT to provide remote help.
Ensure Security
No business today should work with technology solutions that offer anything but top-of-the-line security. Even small businesses are at risk of cyber breaches; one in four SMBs stated they experienced a cyberattack in the past year, according to Microsoft research. Opting for solutions that come from strong names in security like Microsoft is your best bet because these types of technology providers have poured investments into shoring up their security best practices.
Microsoft in particular helps businesses create a robust security stack, which supports your initiatives to embrace Zero-Trust approaches. With Zero Trust, you’ll implement a “never trust, always verify” approach that includes six sophisticated layers of security, including identity, endpoints, applications, network, infrastructure, and data. Microsoft offers multiple solutions to address these layers of security, such as Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Microsoft Defender.
With a renowned technology provider—and a single vendor responsible for your security best practices—you’ll reduce your overall risk of breach. Fewer security breaches means fewer lost dollars as a result of downtime, brand reputation loss, customer defection, and more.
Learn How to Do More with Less
Microsoft offers resources to help you identify where you could be spending unnecessary dollars with other vendors. Point Alliance is happy to help you figure out where you’re leaking money so you can tighten your spending while optimizing your operations. We believe that going with a strong, single solution for your technology needs is the smartest way for a business of any size to cut costs, attract and retain top talent, and ensure security. Get in touch with Point Alliance today to chat about your needs. We have years of experience helping businesses evaluate how to do more with less.
