Raise your hand if you live or work in London. Now raise your hand if you’ve had to deal with never-ending commute journals, seasoned with chaos and disorder in the last few months. Then you’ve probably have suffered the consequences of major strikes on the London Underground, which have left tens of thousands of workers stranded.
But the big question is: what’s happening to the businesses that employ those workers? How much revenue and productivity has been lost? The London underground strikes early this year cost London small businesses £600 million in lost working hours, business and productivity, according to new figures from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).
Although the last 72-hour tube strike early this month was suspended, one of the big demands of the TSSA union has not been yet granted. It seems all ticket offices on the Tube will still close, and commuters have been warned that further strike chaos could be on the way. What does it mean for SMEs? If the threat continues, more businesses will experience time, money and productivity losses that will seriously affect their overall revenue.
Today, London. Tomorrow… New York? Next week… who knows? If you’re responsible for IT, you have to consider the worst-case scenario.
On-premises systems can’t match the cloud for worker mobility
On-premises systems for email, file storage and worker collaboration create vulnerabilities. With these systems, you could face big productivity losses if a major emergency like a transportation strike prevents your workers from coming into the office. That’s because workers won’t be able to do much work when they’re stuck at home without easy access to their data and the ability to collaborate with their co-workers.
One of the key benefits of the cloud is that it enables a mobile work environment. That’s why we partner with Intermedia, the world’s largest one-stop shop for cloud business applications. We encourage our customers to move their email, file sync and share, and collaboration to the cloud. We can provide a seamless transition: all they need is a web browser or a mobile app to immediately access their emails, important documents, instant messaging, and more.
10 tips for making your business mobile
To help businesses become fully mobile, we’ve identified the 10 top requirements for business mobility. Here are three of them:
– Device-to-desktop syncing for email, calendars and contacts. When you delete a message on your phone, it should disappear from Outlook on your computer. Your calendar should be in sync no matter which device you view it on. And when a new employee joins your company, her contact information should appear in every other employee’s phone instantly.
– Remote wipe for when devices go missing. You should be able to remotely erase corporate data on a lost or stolen phone. Better still, your IT people should be able to automatically require employees to have a passcode on any device that can access your email system.
– Secure mobile chat for on-the-go employees. Employees should be able to instant message from their phones just as easily as when they’re on their computers.
Do you want to learn more? Download our white paper in collaboration with Intermedia to read all 10 requirements:
Office in the Cloud: Cloud services for a mobile workforce
Thanks to our partnership with Intermedia, we can provide Office in the Cloud to our clients, offering all of the productivity services needed to enable a mobile workforce. We deliver against all ten requirements for mobility with services like hosted Microsoft Exchange email, Hosted SharePoint for file sharing, and Microsoft Lync for collaboration. And it’s all backed by Intermedia’s famous worry-free experience. This includes:
– Free on boarding and migration by our Cloud Concierge team
– 24/7 phone and chat support by our in-house support team
– The simplicity of one bill and one vendor relationship
– A 99.999% uptime SLA to assure extremely high reliability
The latest Tube strike has ended. But the need for business mobility will not. To make your workforce mobile, contact us today and let us know how we can help.
London Transport strikes: a reason to enable a mobile work environment