Digital adoption is built-into the culture of many businesses, but many are understandably cautious due to the lack of a business case.
According to IDC, at least 50% of Australian organisations will be digitally determined, transforming markets and reimagining processes through new business models and digitally enabled products and services by 2020.
One of the leading, proven market-leading solutions that is helping them get there is Microsoft 365 – and it’s got a ton of benefits that can more than appeal to most SMB use cases for digital. But how does it handle the most important concerns – innovation, costs, and security?
In this article, we break down 3 ways Microsoft 365 drives innovation, improves your ROI and protects your IP – and why it’s essential for SMBs to consider heading into 2020.
#1 – Drives workplace innovation for future transformation
Adopting Microsoft 365 enables your business to save significant time and money and free up staff and leadership to drive more innovation opportunities using the new tools at their disposal.
The digitisation of traditionally long-winded processes that are now heavily streamlined and unified in one package (documents, email, file-sharing, team communication) and use of data to drive better business decisions (reporting in MS Excel vs reporting in visualised analytics apps like Power BI) opens up your end-users to spend more time focusing on value-add services for customers rather than tinkering with systems, worrying about maintenance or having to use multiple disjointed third-party applications for their work. M365’s entire toolset is unified and natively integrated with the broader services of Microsoft Azure, lending a level of flexibility and agility that businesses can’t get if they remain on-premises and avoid digital transformation.
A cornerstone of any business strategy is to stay ahead of industry trends. Going digital allows your business to harness the same technology customers most likely use to create a modern workplace that leads across collaboration, communication and productivity, rather than follows. By empowering your user’s with the latest digital tools, which, thanks to M365’s cloud-enabled delivery model, means new features and updates are always automatically updated and regularly released, you can foster greater innovation through a workplace built on Microsoft 365.
#2 – Improves your ROI and optimises business costs
Using Microsoft 365 Business allows your company to shift away from expensive CapEx servers that have a short end-of-life (EOL), and instead take advantage of a low-cost monthly subscription that continuously evolves and improves its capabilities, offerings and value.
According to Forrester Research’s The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Modern Desktop With Microsoft 365, companies can save an average of $7.3 million US ($7.7 million AU) in total cost of ownership (TCO) by moving their business to a modern desktop platform like Microsoft 365.
But how, exactly?
Modern Workplace platforms like Microsoft 365 have 80% of your technology needs built into it – email, calendaring, messaging, collaboration, storage, identity management, security & compliance, process & workflow automation, data visualisation and analytics, bookings management, schedule and task management, Windows 10 Business licensing, Office Apps – all with guaranteed 99.9% up-time. Instead of having multiple software or systems, it’s all-in-one.
Many companies interviewed in the Forrester report prior to using Microsoft 365 had common pain-points of not just increasingly complex environments, but reduced ROI and rising costs using both Microsoft and traditional third-party on-premises solutions. Lack of optimisation and rising end-user requirements made these systems costly to maintain, and being so complex, resulted in expensive downtime and productivity disruption.
With M365, you can simply your environment, give both IT and end-users all the tools they need in a unified platform, and save on costs immediately with the cloud-enabled delivery model that automates several IT processes and gives self-service access to end users, lowering CapEx costs related to on-premises systems by reducing IT admin effort and involvement overall.
#3 – Advanced Compliance and Security that protects company intellectual property
Microsoft 365 offers the best compliance and security controls for small businesses today, especially those conscious of keeping secure and compliant, while reducing costs overall.
M365, consisting of Office Apps and its key collaboration services (Exchange Online, OneDrive and Teams) are all-in one when it comes to having unified controls that securely provide the productivity capabilities end-users need and the management tools IT need to stay safe against intentional and unintentional threats, including but not limited to:
- Accidental and malicious malware infection
- Data breaches and password loss
- Email threats
- Incorrect user roles and access to sensitive company information
- User accounts being hacked
M365’s Advanced Threat Protection protects your staff against all kinds of sophisticated security threats with automatic malware protection on Windows 10 devices, and with in-built anti-virus. It verifies all links, attachments, and emails sent to users, which is backed up by Data Loss Prevention (DLP) which a policy and security feature that lets you create and enforce BYOD policies, manage who has access to company information by applying restrictions like Do not Copy and Do Not Forward. Both ultimately help you secure corporate and customer data and ensure governance so that compliance is upheld and your company IP is always protected.