Are you wondering why are so many businesses moving to Office 365? It’s because businesses using Microsoft cloud services revenue grew by 10% more than those not using the cloud, they also saved 58% over 7 years with Office 365 cloud services (E3 plan) compared to on-premise equivalent (Source: BCG Economic Impact Study Infographic) and offers many other benefits … Check out eight of the best below.
Focus on Core business
It’s time to focus on your product, not on your infrastructure. The Suppliers will take care of your system, so you don’t have to worry about spending time maintaining the system yourself. Leaving you free to focus on the things that matter, like growing your business.
No hardware, VPNs, firewalls and networks
If you recognize that hardware equipment cost you money and time, don’t worry! Office 365 will relieve you of that burden. No onsite hardware building costs needed, Office 365 is centrally hosted in the cloud, so you don’t need to have any server running locally (on premises).
Moving to Office 365 cloud will give you the ability to access Office applications such as Outlook, OneDrive, Skype for Business, and SharePoint regardless of whether you are directly connected to your organization’s network infrastructure or not. In other words, instead of buying hardware to support your business, you are basically outsourcing this set of tasks.
No disaster recovery and backup
Making decisions about disaster recovery criteria can be a CIO’s worst nightmare. Planning, implementing and testing a strategy can take months. Additionally, backing up your data on a regular basis is both time-consuming and costly, but losing your accounting data could be catastrophic, and your business could fail as a result. With Office 365, your system will be protected by Microsoft in case of a disaster, so no need to worry about DR plans.
Managed services
Office 365 will only host your data but you still have full control on management of this data; you can control the permissions, who can access it, who can see it, who can edit it or delete it. In addition, SharePoint takes care of all the versioning and even lets you check out a document to edit so that nobody else can edit it at the same time.
Auto updates and upgrades
The beauty of cloud computing is that the servers are off-premise, out of sight and out of your hand. Office 365 will take care of them for you and roll out regular software updates – including security updates – so you don’t have to regularly worry about installing new updates. Letting Microsoft do the heavy lifting frees up the IT team to do more important things such as helping users get the most out of enterprise software.
Service Availability
Office 365 was designed with reliability in mind and Microsoft does more than the promise they’ll be online; they offer SLA (Service Level Agreement) with 99.9% up-time guarantee. Microsoft has multiple data-centers, located all over the world, hosting redundant network architecture. If there is an outage at one data-center, another can act as a backup. Customers will be affected with as little service interruption as possible.
Cheap support
In general, Office 365 support is 15% cheaper than On-premises support, for example if you ever needed a help or faced a problem that needs to be fixed, with your Office 365 subscription you get a global network of experts with decades of knowledge about Microsoft productivity and collaboration tools. Also, the office 365 community has self-help option including helpful blogs, useful contents and knowledgeable experts to answer your question. In addition, office 365 provide you with Self-help troubleshooters to solve common issues quickly. The result? Imagine how all this will save your time and money.
Available Partners
Office 365 is designed to be easy to buy and use and to deliver a familiar experience that lets you get started right away. Microsoft has certified Office 365 partners all over the world.
A Microsoft Partner can help you get the most value from your investment. A partner can help you to Identify business needs and how Office 365 and other solutions can help you to solve them. The partner will assess your current IT infrastructure, how it can be improved, and how to get ready for Office 365. They can help you to choose the right mix of Office 365 services to get the services you need to achieve your business goals.
Once you have a plan for moving to Office 365, a partner can help ensure your success by providing comprehensive deployment and migration assistance to ensure that the transition is smooth. They will configure the services to meet your needs and customizing SharePoint Online to your specific needs. Not to mention, training your users and IT administrators how to get the most out of Office 365.
Should I move to Office 365?
Any three of the above benefits would be enough to convince many businesses to move their business into the Office 365. But when you add up all of them, it’s approaching no-brainer territory.