With employees working remotely, cloud-based solutions provide security

As a business owner, your information is a gold mine. You take steps to protect your servers and keep your data safe from ransomware, malware and other attacks. But in reality, how safe is that data?
“Even with all the measures you put in place, what you think is secure internally is not,” says Curtis Verhoff, advanced solutions manager at Blue Technologies Inc. “The cloud provides a tighter layer of security. And with COVID-19 and more people working remotely, a cloud-based solution can keep your business running as close to normal as possible.”
Smart Business spoke with Verhoff about why it’s critical to embrace cloud-based document solutions and how doing so can both protect your data and quickly and securely enable the mobility of your workforce.
What are the biggest concerns businesses have about moving to the cloud?
They have a hard time letting go of what they think of as the security of keeping data in-house.
But the cloud provides tighter security than if they house data on their own servers. And with people suddenly being forced to work remotely, that is critical.
Even if companies previously embraced technology, they were still dealing with paper documents. The cloud allows you to share documents more securely than email.
A lot of businesses were afraid to dip their toes into a cloud-based solution, and nothing was forcing them to. With the pandemic, culture shock happened, and they were forced to change whether they wanted to or not. Then once they started seeing increased efficiencies and a reduction of lost time, they are wondering why they didn’t make a move sooner.
How can a cloud-based solution benefit companies whose workers are suddenly working remotely?
While employees are working remotely, businesses need to operate as they did previously, finding ways to continue to do the same type of document processing outside the office that they did inside.
This isn’t going away. Finding ways of enhancing, embracing and using technology from a cloud-based sense is going to be part of the everyday business process.
This pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the fact that they’ve got to have a way of doing business no matter what happens to disrupt the marketplace. From a planning perspective, you need to have a way of being productive no matter where people are.
How can a business move to the cloud?
Team up with a reliable partner that can help you understand your challenges, pain points and inefficiencies, and what you’re missing by not using this technology. Your partner will learn what you’re trying to accomplish and come up with robust solutions that allow people to be productive, give them powerful solutions and prepare your business to deal with future mass disruptions.
Having a trusted partner can help you adjust and modify your solutions strategically as your business moves into the future.
Once the pandemic passes, will businesses return to the old way of doing things?
This could happen again. Whether it’s a virus or another long-term disruption, you want these solutions in place, so the discomfort and pain you’ve felt through this don’t happen again.
Businesses need to be prepared, and once they start to see the cost savings, the reduction they realize from not having all of this infrastructure, they’ll realize that, from a cost standpoint, it makes sense.

Once you’ve embraced these technologies to help your workforce overcome this situation and keep your company afloat, you need to continue to embrace those, whether you are in a physical office or working remotely.

Insights Technology is brought to you by Blue Technologies Inc.