Business Mobility: Is Your Business Ready for the Future?

Increasing numbers of businesses are embracing the benefits of being mobile, and responsive to change. Business mobility can lower costs, increase productivity, and streamline day-to-day operations. While mobility was once the preserve of larger companies, it is becoming mainstream for businesses of all types and sizes, thanks to the widespread availability of mobile devices and web-based applications. According to the 2014 IDC Asia Pacific Enterprise Mobility Survey, 54% of small to medium enterprises in the region are embracing mobility capabilities.

Is your business ready to embrace the future and go mobile?

Defining business mobility

Business mobility at its most basic means having the capability to operate as a mobile office. This includes having up-to-date business critical information constantly at your fingertips, and the ability for all staff members to work, communicate and collaborate in a simple and secure manner, from anywhere, at any time. On the customer engagement side, business mobility can also include having mobile point of sale technology and customer relationship management systems.

Using cloud-based applications to go mobile

There are any number of cloud solutions that can allow you to go mobile, from something as simple as using a web-based email platform that enables staff to communicate and collaborate on documents and calendars, to moving your business operations entirely to the cloud or even using a virtual desktop solution to provide continuity of user experience over all devices.

Using cloud-based applications has a number of advantages, including:

  • Business critical information, such as sales figures and accounts information, is always current and available.
  • Staff can work and collaborate from anywhere, using any device, which can boost productivity.
  • The cloud allows businesses to access different resources, and provides centralised storage and scalability, rather than being limited by the capabilities of the physical machines and servers in the office.
  • Using cloud services can save you time and money when it comes to procurement, setup and configuration of IT resources.
  • Backups can be set to run automatically, and data is kept securely and is able to recovered quickly in the event of a disaster.

When you think of going mobile or having a mobile office, you probably wonder if that means doing away with your existing IT infrastructure altogether.

But you don’t have to move all your business operations to the cloud in order to gain some of the benefits of business mobility. Each business is different, and there are various considerations to make.

Mobility with a network

The traditional technology stack in most businesses generally consists of front-end business applications and back-end servers. Behind the scenes there is a network framework that supports communication. Good networks must support each business feature for effective communications and sharing of resources.

Just like all businesses are different, all networks can be engineered differently. A network that supports users who access applications through their office computers for example, will look different to a network that supports mobile staff that interacts with both clients and head office. Mobility in the latter case may mean that your business has to consider device, web-mail and FTP servers  for example.

Getting there
There are IT foundations that need to be laid in order for you to take your business mobile. Whether you want to move to the cloud or achieve mobility with a network, at Deployus, we can help you lay those foundations and reap the benefits of business mobility.