How does Microsoft Azure cloud work?

This short video provides a general understanding of how the Microsoft Azure cloud platform works and what’s happening technology-wise behind the scenes.

Azure makes it easy for developers and IT professionals to be agile when they build, deploy, and manage their applications and services.

However, this agility can have unintended consequences if unauthorised resources are created or left running after they are no longer needed. The solution is to use Azure’s resource access management tools as part of your organisation’s governance programmes.

Want to find out more?

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Why collaboration is now a business essential, not a ‘nice to have’

Every company is in the relationship business. The best way to serve customers and move your business forward is to work better with others towards a common goal. Collaboration (both offline and online) is one of the most important driving forces for continued growth in any business, small or large.

Collaboration lays a foundation for better teamwork. Effective and meaningful collaboration is much more than just ‘working together,’ and employees who collaborate better are able to work towards providing new and superior solutions to customers they serve.

Employees are part of a greater whole, and working together is the only way business goals and visions can be achieved. Your employees are more likely to continue working with you when they have strong connections and relationships with the people they work with and feel they’re a part of something bigger. Collaborating isn’t easy for everyone, but it will, over time, get your business to a much better position to innovate.

The right collaboration technology can have a significant impact on your business

Collaboration tools are changing the way we work. Collaboration based on cloud technology is fast becoming a permanent feature of the contemporary workplace. The popularity of online tools and platforms have helped reinforce the benefits of collaboration for businesses. Many organisations from all industries are turning to technology to eliminate physical barriers and enhance business growth.

With different business communication products and services ranging from email to project collaboration to storage, including Outlook, Office 365, Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, Skype and OneDrive, Microsoft allows businesses of all sizes to connect and communicate to increase productivity.

With Office 365, employees can track and participate in business operations from any office, on any device and at different geographical locations. Leveraging the power of the right collaboration tools will give any business a competitive edge. Collaboration tools do not just encourage better knowledge sharing; they improve the speed and effectiveness of people’s efforts, and make it easier to execute on ideas.

With the right tools like Teams, Yammer and Skype, your business can take care of online meetings, team chats, group brainstorming, task sharing, and more. Collaboration technologies help shape how work is done in different departments and enable teamwork that leads to better results, greater innovation and ultimately higher productivity.

Collaboration reduces the barriers to productivity and business growth

The success of your business depends on how fast people can open up and work with each other. Tasks and projects that may now take months can be reduced to a few weeks to solve or complete. Most importantly, team members contribute different, unique standpoints and expertise to get things done. Multiple ideas and solutions make it easier to find better answers to business problems, and with cloud solutions like SharePoint and OneDrive, employees can contribute remotely to projects in real time.

Businesses that have access to collaboration tools and systems are able to access information, documents and business data faster. Your decision process can be shortened when the right communication structures are employed.

Good communication eliminates unnecessary and long business processes, allowing for collaborative discussion and helping to disseminate ideas, documents and general information across your business quicker.

It encourages a culture of ongoing learning

Companies that make room for collaboration open new opportunities for growth among colleagues. They allow their employees to enhance their capacity to grow beyond their comfort zones and take the business to new heights.

When people open up and work without fear or favor, they are able to share their knowledge, experience and skills with team members freely. Workplace collaboration challenges people to think, communicate and receive clarity about what they are good at and how best they can use their skills for the growth of the business.

Individuals within teams can share with each other – exploring, testing and refining new ideas. Effective collaboration builds trust among employees and teaches them to rely on each other – allowing them to function as a more cohesive unit.

Collaboration encourages creative and original thinking

Many smart employees are disengaged due to poor communication or internal collaboration systems. You can empower your employees to become part of the company’s future by opening up better communication channels that allow them to contribute to ongoing projects. Collaboration, when executed well, brings different voices, specialties, teams, and opinions from several locations together to solve business problems. With the right tools, employees can brainstorm and come up with creative ideas.

Microsoft Teams, now available in Office 365, gives your team an incredible opportunity to interact and share ideas with each other. All your content, tools, people, and conversations are available in the team workspace to encourage creative thinking and provide a modern conversation experience for your employees.

The value of creating an environment where employees are encouraged to think creatively and put their ideas forward should not be underestimated. Promote and foster creativity by investing in the right collaboration resources.

It moves any business more effectively toward its goals

Collaboration and better communication has far reaching benefits for your business. True collaboration improves competitiveness by enabling better communication and better work-flow between employees, partners, and customers.

When properly executed, the outcome of embracing cloud collaboration tools often exceed expectations. Expect employees work better, stimulate fresh thinking and encourage innovation, taking your company to new heights.

If your business is yet to fully benefit from collaboration tools, invest time and resources into the right apps and systems for your company today. Expect and celebrate teamwork. Encourage employees to use the right tools instead of relying heavily on just email. Better collaboration can be the lifeblood that lets new ideas thrive throughout your business.

Want to find out more?

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back. This handy infographic from Microsoft also outlines succinctly how its solutions can assist your organisation’s GDPR needs.

4 ways tech is changing (and offering opportunities) to SMBs

One thing is clear no matter the size of your business: Technology has impacted our culture in such a way that what has made your business successful in the past won’t necessarily guarantee future success. Customers expect to interact with brands in the same highly digital ways they do with their family and friends. Employees have new expectations when it comes to where and how they get work done. Innovation is happening faster than ever before.

The key to keeping up for small businesses? Technology. Thanks to the cloud, IT that was formerly reserved for big companies with big budgets is now available to businesses of all sizes. And because of this, there has never been a better time for SMBs to embrace technologies that change the way they do business, connect with customers, drive profits and innovate. We call this digital transformation. For many businesses, the word “transformation” probably feels intimidating, overwhelming and perhaps even unreachable. The most common myth I hear from many business owners is that transformation equals business disruption and change management challenges. But the reality is that technology can enable small businesses to achieve what they may not have thought possible – things like uncovering new revenue streams through data insights, or automating routine business processes to get time back in their day.

Put simply, there’s no better time for SMBs to embrace digital transformation. And Complete IT Systems and Microsoft can assist you on this journey.

Trend 1: The way people want to work is changing

Business no longer happens in one place; The concept of the workday being 9 to 5 and the office being a place with four walls is no longer the norm. In fact, nine out of 10 employees spend at least 20 percent of their time away from their primary workplace. Yet things like real-time communication, face-to-face interactions and leveraging collective knowledge are still critical to employee productivity. So, it’s up to business owners today to re-imagine how to provide these experiences in this new world of work.

The Autry Museum recognised this shift in how work gets done and was quick to adopt technology to help its employees stay connected despite being dispersed between three sites across the Los Angeles area. The museum transitioned to Office 365 to enable its employees to be more productive while away from their desks – a critical capability given that the majority of the staff spends most of their day on the museum floor. Now, employees can quickly respond to emails. schedule meetings and manage their calendars from wherever they are. This functionality has been especially beneficial when managing the many events that take place at the museum – staff can easily check calendars for venue availability, manage rentals and share documents with clients in real time. This freedom to work in whatever way is best for the individual, while remaining productive and connected with the business and providing the best guest service possible, is especially crucial.

Trend 2: Customer expectations are changing

The ability to acquire and retain customers is perhaps the single most important factor for small business success. Without customers, nothing else matters, which is why more than half of all businesses say their success depends on their ability to be highly responsive to customers’ specific needs. We know that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, but for a small business, this can be a daunting expectation given that resources are tight and staff time is even tighter. While good customer service will always require a personal touch, technology has helped small businesses consolidate customer information, automate routine processes and act faster on new opportunities than ever before.

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is quickly moving from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for businesses to provide the level of service customers expect. These solutions enable businesses to track customer information such as purchase history, follow-up actions, preferences and more to build loyalty among current customers and uncover new revenue opportunities. Many CRM systems integrate with a business’s existing technology to provide a seamless experience. For example, Outlook Customer Manager is a simple but powerful new feature available to Office 365 users that offers businesses a complete view of interactions with individual customers, helps track tasks and deals in progress and sends reminders for important meetings and milestones. And, as business needs grow, companies can move from Outlook Customer Manager to Dynamics 365 to take advantage of enhanced customer information, insights into process efficiency and consistency and deeper financial insights.

Trend 3: Technology can do the work for you

In many small businesses, IT management isn’t afforded a full headcount. Often, it’s either the business owner or the employee who knows the most about technology who carries the burden. The cloud takes the responsibility of technology maintenance and updates off the business and puts it on the cloud service provider – freeing up business owners and employees to focus on other revenue-generating tasks.

Today’s cloud platforms and applications empower small businesses to reduce the cost and complexity of their IT investments while also boosting compliance and security with automatic updates that give them peace of mind. Fifty-two percent of businesses worldwide say the cloud makes their IT staff more productive, and data from Boston Consulting Group shows that businesses that leverage cloud technology improve their efficiency and productivity.

Trend 4: Data is taking the risk out of owning a business

Small business owners invest their blood, sweat, tears and – in many cases – their entire worth into their business. So, making decisions on behalf of the business based on assumptions or gut feelings isn’t enough. Data is a small business’s secret weapon in keeping pace with the competition and keeping customers. To understand how to grow and evolve their organization, a business owner should lean on data to help them anticipate the next big thing – whether that be an untapped industry opportunity or emerging customer need.

Most businesses today have a wealth of data on hand that will provide insight into exactly these things, but many don’t know how to stitch it all together to uncover the opportunities that will propel their business forward. For instance, customer purchase history data can help businesses better identify when they’ll need to stock up on certain products. Web traffic patterns give insight into the best times to target customers with ads and offers. Data is key in unlocking insights from the data businesses already have at their fingertips, and takes the guesswork out of running a company.

Technology built to work for you

The key to good technology is that it works for you, and not the other way around. Microsoft cloud solutions bring together the best platforms like Windows 10 with best-in-class applications like Office 365, Skype, OneDrive, Dynamics 365 and others to make work easier for businesses and help them better compete and grow. With Microsoft’s cloud solutions, small businesses now have access to the same calibre of technology that their enterprise counterparts use, removing the long-standing barriers that used to give big business a leg up and empowering small businesses to drive forward industry transformation.

Want to find out more?

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back. This handy infographic from Microsoft also outlines succinctly how its solutions can assist your organisation’s GDPR needs.

Position your financial services business for success

No sector has felt the pressure of digital transformation more than financial services. New and emerging technologies fueled by huge private equity investments are challenging centuries-old business models, and existing businesses are rushing to keep up. In our research into digital transformation, a third of financial services executives felt their industry will be disrupted by new entrants (significantly higher than other industries we looked at).

Whether you’re a large, established enterprise, or a small FinTech challenger looking to disrupt the industry, there are three things that your business needs to be able to do effectively: access and interpret data in real time, create agile and collaborative teams, and stay on top of rapidly-changing regulatory compliance. The companies that can do these three things well stand a much better chance of surviving and thriving in a digitally transformed world.

Data is the new currency:

The proliferation of mobile devices and cloud technology has brought about exponential growth in the amount of data we create – everything from an increase in the volume of mobile banking transactions, to the variety of customer service channels for insurance companies.

For many financial services companies, the data of a transaction is becoming as valuable as the pounds and pence themselves. Being able to access, make sense of and collaborate on that data in real-time on any device is essential. Microsoft Excel offers cutting-edge tools like Power Query to gather data and Power Pivot to model, analyze and transform it into meaningful information to make informed decisions. Add-on tool Power BI gives users the ability to pull in data from internal and external sources to build custom dashboards for a near anytime, anywhere view of the health of your business. Because it’s available as part of Office 365, firms of any size have access to powerful analytics capability of Excel.

Agility at the heart of transformation:

As financial services firms ramp up the products and services they offer to customers, the higher the expectations of those customers for quick answers to their questions. The whole industry is speeding up, as traditional, manual processes get replaced by faster and more sophisticated digital solutions. As a result, financial services companies must be able to access and collaborate on information better than they have before. Fortunately Office 365 provides a tightly integrated platform that builds powerful collaborative capabilities into these tools. In addition to file sharing in the cloud, teams can access, edit, manage and share files and data from any device using OneDrive, SharePoint or Skype for Business, and engage in enhanced coauthoring. Users can collaborate with the videoconferencing, messaging and content-sharing tools of Skype for Business. Files and people remain synced.

Compliance is Crucial:

As noted before, organisations are facing significant data overload due to exploding amounts of increasingly complex electronic data. Regulatory compliance is a crucial part of financial services, and it impacts every technology decision your company makes. But with the proliferation of data, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure your decisions are compliant. Microsoft’s solutions can be invaluable in compliance.

Want to find out more?

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back. This handy infographic from Microsoft also outlines succinctly how its solutions can assist your organisation’s GDPR needs.

Get a business processes and CRM makeover

Ask any business owner their main challenges in running a business and they will likely tell you that finances, people and time (or the lack of it) are what keep them up at night. Is your business in the same boat?

Most small to medium sized business owners find it difficult to adequately plan their finances and attempt to predict with pipeline and cashflow planning, which can be tricky. Often, employee productivity levels are stretched due to unstructured operating processes that have been bolted on as the business grew. And owners frequently waste time working between siloed customer data, financial spreadsheets and business information in multiple locations. There’s one thing linking all these challenges – multiple, disparate business packages. And they’re holding your business back.

But now you can get everything in one place, on one platform, with Dynamics 365 Business Edition. This cloud-based suite of intelligent applications is designed and priced for small to medium sized businesses, combining business process management and customer relationship management software into one powerful solution. It connects your people and processes, making financial management, sales, service and operations less of a challenge. And, because it’s cloud-based, it’s easy to scale and grow as your business needs evolve.

Check out this short video to see some of the benefits.

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

5 latest tech trends to give SMBs the edge

Small and Medium Enterprises accounted for 99%* of all businesses in the UK in recent years, with 76%* of those only employing the owner. With increased pressure to deliver a top quality (often immediate) service, the people at the top already have a lot of hats to wear.

Until someone invents a time machine that allows more than 24 hours in any one day, passion and hard work only get you so far. That’s why successful businesses are turning to tech to boost productivity and improve competitiveness – and Complete IT Systems can make the transition even smoother for you.

Make sure you do…before your competitors do!

Base decisions on accurate data

Man working in shop

It sounds obvious, but it’s not easy. Entrepreneurs make a lot of good but gut-based decisions. As your business grows, however, so does the need to shift decision-making to base it on solid data.

Fortunately, technology and cloud services can help you turn unfiltered data into useful insights. Free tools such as Microsoft Power BI turns raw data into rich visuals that can help you spot trends, and can pull in data directly from many of today’s popular cloud apps. This can help you understand your market properly and, when it comes to expanding or diversifying, not make assumptions that you’ll later regret.

Maximise your billable time

Audio and web conferencing tools are becoming more sophisticated, making it more acceptable to use apps like Skype for Business to stay in touch with clients without having to travel for face-to-face meetings. That travel time can be turned into productive work that is better for your clients and their customer experience.

Get out from behind your desk

Woman getting in car

A critical capability for today’s businesses is the need to stay productive away from your desk. The ability to quickly respond to emails, update and share documents and manage calendars wherever, whenever is a game changer for many small businesses.

Technology such as Office 365 gives businesses the freedom to work in whatever way is best for them, while remaining connected to their customers who expect fast and highly digital interactions. It also makes it easier to be part of company-wide conversations. Team chat tools such as Microsoft Teams keep everyone in the loop via the same team workspace – from sales people out in the field to the people responsible for the yes/no decisions. Using virtual workspaces can also help you free up physical desk space, and office overheads too, both of which can stifle growth in the early stages of establishing a business.

Trouble-free transformation

Transformation does not have to equal business disruption and change management challenges. Thanks to the cloud, IT that was formerly the domain of large company budgets is now accessible for SMEs.

Moving to the cloud also cuts the reliance on your own servers, putting you in a better position for backing up data and disaster recovery. A power outage at one of your locations or a stolen laptop no longer means a critical loss of business or security. In the long run, this doesn’t just save money it also improves reliability.

Learn from what they wish they knew

Technology is a great business enabler, whatever your size or maturity. Are you taking advantage of the latest tech innovations? Staying as connected to your customers as your competitors?

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Microsoft solutions for GDPR compliance

As you have almost certainly heard by now, the GDPR regulations come into force this month.

The question for many business owners is how do you cut across the noise to implement to achieve GDPR compliance but keep your company running how you need it to at the same time?

Microsoft solutions can help your business with GDPR readiness, and as an accredited and specialised Microsoft partner, and Complete IT Systems can help you select and implement them.

Microsoft’s Office and Office 365 solutions have in-built industry-leading security measures and privacy policies to safeguard your data in the cloud, including the categories of personal data identified by the GDPR. Office and Office 365 can help you on your journey to reducing risks and achieving compliance with the GDPR.

One essential step to meeting the GDPR obligations is discovering and controlling what personal data you hold and where it resides. There are many Office 365 solutions that can help you identify or manage access to personal data:

  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Office and Office 365 can identify over 80 common sensitive data types including financial, medical, and personally identifiable information. In addition, DLP allows businesses and organisations to configure actions to be taken upon identification to protect sensitive information and prevent its accidental disclosure.
  • Advanced Data Governance uses intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on, and take action to manage the lifecycle of the data that is most important to your organisation.
  • Office 365 eDiscovery search can be used to find text and metadata in content across your Office 365 assets—SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online, and Exchange Online. In addition, powered by machine learning technologies, Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery can help you identify documents that are relevant to a particular subject (for example, a compliance investigation) quickly and with better precision than traditional keyword searches or manual reviews of vast quantities of documents.
  • Customer Lockbox for Office 365 can help you meet compliance obligations for explicit data access authorisation during service operations. When a Microsoft service engineer needs access to your data, access control is extended to you so that you can grant final approval for access. Actions taken are logged and accessible to you so that they can be audited.

Another core requirement of the GDPR is protecting personal data against security threats. Current Office 365 features that safeguard data and identify when a data breach occurs include:

  • Advanced Threat Protection in Exchange Online Protection helps protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time. It also allows you to create policies that help prevent your users from accessing malicious attachments or malicious websites linked through email.
  • Threat Intelligence helps you proactively uncover and protect against advanced threats in Office 365. Deep insights into threats—provided by Microsoft’s global presence, the Intelligent Security Graph, and input from cyber threat hunters—help you quickly and effectively enable alerts, dynamic policies, and security solutions.
  • Advanced Security Management enables you to identify high-risk and abnormal usage, alerting you to potential breaches. In addition, it allows you to set up activity policies to track and respond to high risk actions.
  • Office 365 audit logs allow you to monitor and track user and administrator activities across workloads in Office 365, which help with early detection and investigation of security and compliance issues.

As Microsoft Gold Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back. This handy infographic from Microsoft also outlines succinctly how its solutions can assist your organisation’s GDPR needs.