You're the CEO of a Manhattan based security firm with 75 employees on staff situated in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. All your employees use email and a variety of mobile devices to access their work content. At your Manhattan location you have a growing IT closet filled with racks of servers to handle your company's digital needs and truth be told, it's causing you too many headaches and costing entirely too much to maintain. So, what are your options?
Either you continue with your IT migraines or you could choose to virtualize your IT needs into the Cloud using a concept called OaaS (Office-asa- Service).
Office-as-a-Service is the process of virtualizing everything a business owner needs to run an office - DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service), telephones (Hosted PBX), email (Hosted Exchange) and full infrastructure/ technical support. The benefits of OaaS are simple: lower overhead, greater efficiency and the elimination of all on-site IT headaches. Let's tackle each component of OaaS, starting with DaaS.
DaaS accomplishes four major goals: mobility, application control, security and hardware/software refresh. Having employees all over the country is great for targeting various sales markets but as a CEO, you want to ensure all of your staff is logging into the same infrastructure that they would if they were sitting at your Manhattan location. DaaS accomplishes this by providing every employee in your company with a VM hosted in a central datacenter which looks and feels just like an actual desktop. DaaS supplies your employees with full mobility allowing them to get work done from anywhere.
The ability to get work done from anywhere means your employees aren't under face-to-face supervision. For all you know while your sales rep in L.A. is filing a cost-analysis report, at the same time he might be surfing Facebook. DaaS allows for application control meaning as a CEO you can control, at a highly finite level, what your employees can and can't do while logged into the company Cloud OaaS infrastructure.
As a CEO, another one of your major concerns is security. You need to make sure all the data your employees are filing via the Internet is safe. DaaS accomplishes this by protecting all of your information within a datacenter behind software and hardware firewalls.
Above all, your main concern is the bottom line. To help your bottom dollar, DaaS removes hardware/ software refresh from your concerns. Without DaaS, every three years you buy very expensive IT equipment because Dell says your current gear and software is outdated. By leveraging your existing infrastructure and provisioning it for the Cloud, you never have to buy new hardware or software ever again. DaaS means your IT provider takes care of refreshing allowing you to avoid the most recent copy of Microsoft Outlook 10 and saving a ton of money in the process.
So you've changed over to DaaS, yet you still have a legacy Nortel phone system. It has some features you love, but overall your phone system is cost heavy and feature limited. With employees in three cities you want to be able to reach them when you need to. Hosted PBX turns your employee's company cellphone into their office phone, accessible any time and equipped with an entire corporate contact list, complete internal extensions, your beloved call waiting music and unlimited local- and long-distance calling, among a laundry list of other features.
Your L.A. sales rep is doing a cost-analysis report, however, all of his contacts for the report aren't based in Los Angeles. Rather he has to call Miami ad infinitum. Working off a Verizon monthly plan Mr. L.A. is only allotted x amount of minutes calling here and x amount of minutes calling there. Verizon doesn't care that he needs 2,500 minutes with your Miami Sales Rep to get the full story because Verizon only allows him 500 minutes. As CEO this means you have to cover the overage costs. Hosted PBX provides unlimited local- and long-distancecalling with predictable monthly spend and a nifty feature called built-in disaster recovery/continuity.
To get more information on his cost-analysis report Mr. L.A. has to call your Director of Sales based in Manhattan. The only problem is it snowed 4 feet the night before limiting the Director of Sales ability to get into the office. With your legacy phone system, Mr. L.A. is out of luck because he can't get in contact with anyone in the Manhattan office. Built-in disaster recovery/continuity allows the Director of Sales to utilize the mobility features of your Hosted PBX platform to work from home and still have the same features of his work environment even if there is a blizzard raging outside. Three years ago you spent $15,000 on an internal Exchange server to provide you with email services. So why, if you already have an internal Exchange server, do you need to change to a Hosted Exchange ESP (Email Service Provider)? You need it because a Hosted Exchange ESP reduces or eliminates your CAPEX, supplies you with hardware refresh and relieves you of IT headaches.
Switching to a Hosted Exchange ESP provides you with email continuity, synchronization across devices, and in some cases, advanced anti-spam and message archiving and compliance. With your internal exchange if your server goes down, your email goes down severely limiting companywide performance. This is not so with a Hosted Exchange ESP.
Email continuity means never having to worry about your company server crashing, squashing company performance. It means your email server is always up and running synchronized across all devices. If your L.A. sales rep wants to check his email on his iPad he can. If your Manhattan Director of Sales wants to check email on his cellphone, he can. As Mr. L.A. develops his cost-analysis report he is going to need a way to archive all of his information (think HIPAA Archiving Compliance) for safe keeping.
A Hosted Exchange ESP solves this issue with message archiving and compliance by allowing Mr. L.A. to keep his email out of the exchange system yet remain fully searchable and fully indexable for as long as you want. Message archiving and compliance also solves data loss issues caused by corruption or server crashes. By storing data in the Cloud, you'll always have your data regardless of corruption, server failure or viruses.
Office-as-a-Service streamlines the Cloud by eliminating all the software licensing headaches, all the hardware refreshes, all the desktop refreshes and all the worries associated with a company phone and email server. With OaaS you're greatly increasing network security, giving your employees full mobility, eliminating IT waste and greatly reducing your CAPEX while at the same time getting 24/7/365 technical support.
OaaS is here and it's waiting for you. Your Los Angeles sales rep has a giant sale in the works and he needs the resources OaaS supplies to get it done. What are you waiting for Mr. CEO?
About the Author: Jason Silverglate is the CEO of FortressITX
