As the coronavirus outbreak creates global health concerns, we wanted to address how it could impact businesses that lack the preparations needed to account for such an event. More specifically, we wanted to discuss why events like these add even more reasons that a file share and sync solution is an invaluable addition to your IT resources.
To make a long story short, people aren’t very motivated to go into work when the news cycle is inundated with warnings about an infectious disease spreading worldwide. As a result, businesses everywhere will likely see more employee absences (as many have actually encouraged). While this is clearly better for the public health, an unprepared business will see significant detriments to its productivity and its overall operations. In lieu of this, what can a business do to prepare for absences resulting from a massive health scare, or any other disaster event?
One option is to adopt file synchronization and sharing technologies--an option that more businesses are taking advantage of, for many reasons. With these solutions in place, your workforce no longer needs to be in the office to complete the work responsibilities that must be fulfilled. Therefore, should one of your employees fall ill or otherwise can’t make it into the office, you aren’t losing the productivity they would otherwise offer.
The biggest benefits of this approach are present right in its name:
Consider what could happen if your employees needed to access work resources outside of the office but lacked any approved means to do so. Either the work wouldn’t get done, or your employees would resort to workarounds that involved software that your organization had no control over. The tools that these workarounds utilize, known as shadow IT, can very easily put sensitive company data at risk. Providing your employees with an approved and secure alternative through file sync and sharing can eliminate these risks, as well as support your disaster recovery efforts.
On the subject of allowing employees the means to work outside of the office, imagine if they had worked for three days at home and made excellent progress on a particular project. Sounds great, but not if they showed back up at the office having forgotten to send their progress over--or worse, had neglected to save it.
File sync means that as an employee makes progress on a given file, that progress is automatically saved as an entry in a referenceable version history. This has the added benefit of allowing productivity to be possible with any device that has received access to a given file in the solution.
As collaboration is such a priority in today’s offices, we would be amiss if we didn’t discuss the “sharing” aspect of these solutions. Duplicate copies of a given document only make the collaborative process more confusing. Instead, file sync and sharing solutions allow multiple coworkers to share simultaneous access to a given file, permitting them to work together regardless of the physical distance between them.
Whether you’re proactively preparing for a disaster or you are simply trying to provide your employees with more flexibility, reach out to One Up Solutions Northwest to learn more about the solutions we have available to you. Our experts are available at (503) 278-5011 to answer your questions about your IT.
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