What are benefits of Office 365?

Why should you look in to Microsoft Office 365?

In today’s competitive business environment, businesses, starting from a one man operation to a thousand personnel based operation, sense the need to be highly agile and responsive with their internal business processes.

As offices have transformed into collaborative environments and each department starting from sales and marketing to the boardrooms are heavily dependent on the communications infrastructure, to enable them to take strategic decisions. These systems are no longer perceived as “NICE-TO-HAVE” facilities but deemed as CRITICAL infrastructure. The IT infrastructure deployed to facilitate such high level of collaboration, include email management, calendar system, messaging and document creating, sharing and archiving systems.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s landmark product for small and medium businesses. It provides SMBs with cutting edge Enterprise like IT infrastructure without the additional expenses included. The adoption of Office 365 has grown exponentially over the years to the point where it has become a trend for SMBs to deploy this product without a second thought.

There are certain critical factors driving the adoption of Office 365 and contributing to this trend.

1. Operational Efficiency: Data and internal communications play a critical role on which different business processes are built. Every business department within a business needs to blend effortlessly with the processes and systems in place. This is where Office 365 excels; it provides a seamless infrastructure on top of which the business processes are built. This enables businesses to scale their business processes effortlessly and rapidly, without incurring a heavy financial burden.
2. Maintenance & Upgradation issues: Organisations who deploy on-premise solutions to reap the benefits of a virtual office invest heavily in infrastructure and support teams to take care of the regular maintenance and software upgradations issues. With Office 365, these costs are taken care of and businesses need not be always on the watch for the next upgrade cycle.
3. Virtual Office: Offices are no longer tied to one physical location. Businesses with offices in multiple locations, travelling employees and employees working from remote places/home gain directly from this deployment. Employees have access to all the office systems when they log in to the Office 365 network. This adds a great degree of work flexibility to the business process.
4. High Availability and protection from data outages: Due to the high availability architecture of Office 365, downtime becomes a thing of the past. All the IT systems are always available and accessible. This ensures outages and the resulting data loss are kept at bay and don’t impact the day to day functioning of the business operation.
   The services offered by Office 365 are easily accessible across devices from desktops to mobile. This provides a high degree of mobility to your virtual office.
5. Security & Privacy: As Office 365 complies with the strict international standards on security and privacy, the scope for unauthorised tampering of the IT system and loss of client data is down to zero.
6. Apps Marketplace: Office 365 deployment provides the infrastructure on top of which critical applications can be deployed. The apps available in the marketplace range from simple productivity based applications for small offices to ERP and CRM based applications for big teams.