Embracing Remote Working to Maximise Business Potential

The last year has been troubling for all UK businesses, from the drastic changes to the work environment and working from home to the social and economic struggles the country has faced. MoonComputers is no different. We’ve had to transition our business to a working from home model to maintain our services. Along with this, the changes to the industry have also been a challenge we’ve risen to in terms of installation, implementation and service through varying factors.

Leveraging the changes we have made to our business, we have come to a better understanding of what it takes to help optimise every role in our company, to provide a robust working environment for other businesses. We’re using this knowledge to apply to our customers, providing the same enhanced agility and productivity we have established into our IT services.

In 2021, MoonComputers is generating more business value by driving the use innovative technologies for each IT role and the specific challenges they face; from deployment and supporting digital acceleration to integrating more strategically with the rest of your business and cyber security.

We aim to be the light at the end of your tunnel, applying what we have learned to your businesses IT requirements and enabling you to carry on working to your fullest potential. Also removing the stress of new working environments by embracing these new modes of flexible working to help launch businesses into the new universe of agility and productivity, using greener and more carbon neutral processes and suppliers.

Fast deployment

One of the most immediate needs that many businesses like ourselves had to overcome since the pandemic, was ensuring that staff had the ability to work at home and remain reachable by colleagues and customers.

By utilising our solutions and Infrastructure to enable remote working via Unified Communications, we have designed the ideal processes and Infrastructure that we can apply to help you solve this quandary too. Given our ability to direct calls to any device remote workers use (whether computer, tablet or phone), you customers can call your existing office numbers and enable reliable calling and virtual meetings.

This allows you as a business to prevent staff from having to offer their personal contact information such as home phone numbers. While also ensuring mangers have visibility across call quality and customer experience, and maintaining compliance with responsibilities such as call recording.

The real saving grace of our Unified Communications platform, is the ability to deploy solutions quickly, within a couple of days if necessary. Plus, with the bility to be self-managed thorugh a web-portal, admins now have the ability to proactively meet the needs of the business, such as adding new lines in a matter of minutes.

Using our analysis and insight around call statistics through MoonComputers’ Unified Communications platform, we can also ensure line managers can check teams are remaining productive and offering the level of customer service their business expects.

Adopting new digital services

One way many businesses have chosen to maximise their agility and remain flexible in the face of an ever-changing landscape, is by removing reliance on expensive, on-site solutions. Instead, operations are moving services to Cloud-based solutions that free up resources and better enable ‘work from anywhere’ digital transformations.

Whether it’s a new communications platform such as Microsoft Team Direct Calling, project management services such as Monday, CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce.com, operations are having to rely far more on their internet access.

As more business activities move online, more pressure will be put on an operation’s Connectivity, which is why many are choosing to move to Fibre-based internet services. Some are even installing fibre services at the homes of remote employees that require high-Bandwidth and low latency for their roles.

Fibre transmits data to and from your sites as flashes of light, instead of electrical signals over copper wires used in typical broadband services. Not only does this enable far higher speeds, Scalable up to 1Gbs and beyond, but also increases reliability. Combining these two factors ensures your operation can adopt new services and transition to a more digital focussed business. Also protecting your credibility and income, especially if you operate an e-commerce platform, or rely on your website for lead generation.

Securing network operations

The edge of an operation’s network has grown incredibly and, now that so much data is travelling outside of offices to staff’s homes, the chances of your data being intercepted on-route is growing. Also, consumer hardware such as routers and Wi-Fi hubs don’t have the same level of safeguards that business specific equivalents include. Combined, the lack of monitoring for unusual network behaviour and inability to control data journeys have important implications that need to be addressed.

One option is for IT teams to manage their own firewalls, VPNs and deploy end-to-end Encryption between sites and employee’s homes, but this is time-consuming and complex; not what businesses need to remain agile in this new working world.

The favoured long-term alternative is to outsource these responsibilities to a Managed Service Provider. This enables the network to be constantly monitored by highly trained network engineers that can respond to issues far quicker than employees that also have other roles and responsibilities to juggle at the same time. The time saved alone may be cause enough to warrant the extra spend, even ignoring the reduced chances of a major cyber-attack or falling foul of GDPR standards.

Despite the challenges, operations now have an opportunity transform their operations from the ground up, enabling organisations to respond to future disruption quicker and more strategically. IT leaders have learned many valuable lessons in the past year, from how to quickly enable employees to work remotely, how to create a secure work environment and how to adopt digital initiatives like never before.