Posted by Technology is going to be the most powerful weapon for industries war of survival. To retain clients, employees, and projects, businesses need to counter the current coronavirus pandemic with persistent efforts.
They just can’t wait and watch, to keep businesses alive, small as well as large companies must continue to serve the markets. And, despite lockdown in many parts of the world, things are possible due to easy and affordable availability.
Using a wide array of networking and communication technologies, significant numbers of companies in India and overseas are able to counter the crisis to a great extent.
Digitalisation is on its full swing and all the key sectors, including banking and finance, IT, education, and healthcare are avidly adopting technologies which ensure them freedom from geographical barriers and save their time as well as cost. Following are the technologies which are quite instrumental in saving the businesses during the unprecedented global emergency.
Earlier in many adverse situations that resulted from natural calamity, political unrest, or even a war, shifting of people from one location to another was an evident solution. But, circumstances developed after COVID-19 pandemic are way beyond people’s imagination, from airlines to road transport, all means of commutation are banned in the wake of complete lockdown.
Offices are closed and buildings are sealed till the next announcement. Still, many positive things are happening in the business world and employees are working dedicatedly for their companies. The most effective catalyst in the success of work from home transition is cloud technology which is responsible for seamless connectivity between employers of a company working from different locations.
Realising how things are changing and affecting businesses across the country due to coronavirus, small and big enterprises have been opting for cloud technology in order to keep their businesses running despite the lockdown.
Major cloud service providers in the country have pulled out their resources to help companies migrate from desktop to cloud and help businesses run as usual. The initiative has enabled organisations to go remote and allow their team members to work from varied locations.
Using a host of communication tools, team collaboration software, project management tools, and document management systems, under company’s cloud, employer can integrate various employees of different departments to complete a project within the given deadline.
Let’s try to understand this with an example, suppose the construction work is going on at a location which is not closed due to lockdown. Using cloud technology and project management software, employees in finance, inventory, procurement, HR and other important departments can have all the essential information of a site.
After logging into the system on their devices, they can have a detailed overview of the construction site and they can chat with each other in their preferred language and may contribute to the project with their professional skills and expertise.
Digital technology has also gifted the business world with many breakthrough employee engagement apps. On the one hand, they are equipped with end-to-end employees communication software such as Blink and Engagement multiplier, on the other hand, they have effective performance appraisal tools like Teamphoria. And, Glint and Inpulse are the sharp analytical apps for analysing employees’ emotional behaviour and attachment with the organisation.
There are also several applications already available that help in maintaining the productivity of an employee. Say Microsoft 365 for example. All it requires is storing the data in the cloud and deploying several applications on an employee’s desktop as well as the mobiles.
That’s it! This ensures everything required to be done on the cloud with as much productivity as required. It enables the users to access and also share their resources across the web, mobile or desktops according to their convenience.
Daily meetings can now happen without any limits through Teams meetings. Not just meetings, but several groups can be formed and continuous communication among these groups can happen over Teams.
Files can be saved, co-authored and edited using OneDrive. Links for such files can easily be shared through Outlook or Teams again. If we have a clear look towards all the Cloud technologies that are available today, we may find n number of such solutions for every need that arises today.
Many companies feel apprehensive about data sensitivity and are still a bit uncomfortable in adopting work from home culture under a single cloud. Despite having advanced security tools based on AI, blockchain, and multi-factor authentication, these sorts of fear are irrational and pessimistic in nature.
(Dr. Christopher Richard is Founder and MD – G7CR Technologies. The views expressed in this article are of the author).