Emerging Tech Trends to Drive Your Business
The world at the beginning of 2021 looks a lot different than the world at the beginning of last year.
Although, we can expect a less chaotic year upon us. The world of tech trends has really played its game in response to this pandemic and will continue to be crucial in the further future.
There’s only one thing we learnt is the importance of Remote work.
It is not going away; many companies have adapted the use of Work from Home to many of their employees to increase their productivity.
With these new tech trends come new opportunities, new pain points and new paths ahead for businesses.
How does this new reality shape the future ahead?
Let’s take a look at some of the emerging tech trends that we think will impact on your business in this year.
Remote Connectivity
People have started re-enter public spaces, many companies continue to see the benefits of remote work, as well as drawbacks.
Yes, Employees have generally reported being happier once they settled into their home offices but working from home has not been positive for their employers.
Large companies are still not ready for their employees to work from home on a large scale.
The demand for support and remote connectivity has grown drastically.
With Zoom and Microsoft Teams became the collaborative tools for all businesses while start-ups like Bluescape also entered the market.
The hardware and defence from cyberattack were among the original challenges from Working from home.
Some companies decided to allow staff to use their personal devices to access their work networks.
Using personal devices means giving opportunity for cybercriminals to access corporate data.
This allowing businesses eliminating the “trust” that can create major security vulnerabilities.
For this reason, businesses should start investing in remote working environments.
This ensure that their team can maximise collaboration and more productivity towards business.
Automation
Every business should automate their workflows. At Setup4, we believe anything that can be automated should be automated.
Businesses have tons of tools to leverage this to cut out inefficient processes.
For example, if you are using Office 365 for your business, leverage the use of power automate and eliminate manual processes.
Power Automate allows you to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronise files, get notifications, collect data, and more.
Many SMB doesn’t have enough resources to do most of their works or tasks thus adding it into their never ending to do list.
With the use of automation, they can automate many marketing, sales, and customer service operations.
Services like Windows Autopilot can automate the entire journey of device configuration from the factory to your employee’s hands when used in combination with Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
That means companies’ configurations and permissions are already set up on each device, eliminating setup tasks for your IT department.
Businesses should look to leverage automation where they can, and gain productivity in areas where they would be better served.
Digital Operations
Many businesses have gone to digital world during the pandemic times, and they expected to continue trending towards being one of their new branches in this online world.
Let’s face it, you can’t back off from your online presence. It has become a backbone for your business.
Scaling business online will require massive investments in infrastructure to support it.
This can be cloud servers, your hardware equipment, maintenance and more.
SMB cannot afford this at this stage. Thanks to the high-speed connectivity, there are subscription services you can use to leverage this investment.
Instead of paying massive upfront fees, subscription services for cloud servers and cloud backup or other hardware equipment can be as low as $10 per month.
You’ll learn more about this in next emerging trend.
One key to success in 2021 will be to bring business to the customer. That could be via a self-driven car but will most likely be by expanding into spaces that your clients live.
For more information about how we can assist you with this task, visit our managed cloud services page.
Everything as a Service (EaaS)
If you cannot automate a task, there is a chance you can outsource it to your MSP provider instead.
Another important tech trends is Cloud services. It aims to simplify everything for your business, everything is offered as a service.
When your business expands, you tend to increase your IT infrastructure thus increasing the knowledge to maintain it.
The Subscription services allows businesses to only have what they needed for their business and avoiding massive up-front costs of owing the means to do.
This means, servers or hardware components are not cheap, Thanks to the subscription services and internet you can use their readily available services in no time.
For example, Office Professional 2019 has an MSRP of $439.99 for a perpetual license.
The collection of its subscription-based Microsoft 365 Apps can be had for as little as $8.25 per month (both web and desktop apps).
At that value, it would take over 53 months to offset the upfront cost of the perpetual license.
The perpetual license only provides one license for one device, as well as just 60 days of support for the product.
With the perpetual license, the user is also responsible for storing and moving their license key to a new piece of hardware.
With the monthly plan, each user subscription to Office 365 comes with installation on five PCs or Macs, as well as five tablets or phones.
Licenses can be moved and verified with login information, while support is available at any time, and apps are automatically updated.
This is just one specific example, but similar benefits often come with any subscription service.
If there is a solution you need, there is likely a company that offers it as a service. This allows your business to optimise your resources and concentrate on what you do best.
You can always talk to our experts at Setup4 for a more affordable solutions for your business.
For a Better World Ahead
Businesses should start investing in collaboration and strengthening their cybersecurity.
Elsewhere, network infrastructure improvements should maximise the efficiency of operations and expand business into previously untapped areas.
At Setup4, we look forward to helping you navigate this world this year.
