TMCnet News
Unified comms can boost SME growth(City A.M. (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) MANAGING multiple communications and IT systems is a challenge for many SMEs. And for expanding organisations like Key Facilities Management (the operations firm has locations spanning the Middle East, North Africa and eastern Europe), the complexity can have a serious impact on the bottom line. "Three or four years ago, there was a danger of us having a silo set-up," says the firm's ICT manager Gordon Mitchell. "In the extreme case, workers in remote places like Kazakhstan might not even have had access to our systems, meaning their work would have to be fed in from other software, which is effectively duplication." By unifying its fixed-line, mobile, email, desktop and web communications using Vodafone One Net and Microsoft Online Services, the firm has been able to cut costs radically. "It allowed us to eliminate a lot of waste." But beyond the considerable cost savings, Mitchell says, unifying communications and adopting the cloud has allowed Key Facilities Management to grow to a level that would have been extremely difficult previously. The majority of our resources can now go into software development, rather than hardware management. We have a team of people analysing our business activity, enhancing what we do and looking for new areas of development. In the past, they would have been tied down making sure that the local networks were functioning." Migrating systems and data to the cloud rings alarm bells in the heads of many IT security experts. And a study released this week by data security firm Thales e-Security claimed that 34 per cent of firms say adopting the cloud computing had a negative impact on their overall security posture, double the amount that said the impact had been positive. But Mitchell thinks it's easy to overstate these dangers, particularly for SMEs. "Some of the warnings are just scare stories. Even data held locally is vulnerable when you connect to the internet." The firm's current set-up, he says, is arguably even more secure now they've moved to the cloud. "If you think about it, Microsoft has got dozens and dozens of experts looking at security issues. When we had a problem, it was looked at by someone from Microsoft who had actually helped develop the platform. That's a level of expertise we couldn't afford previously." LIAM WARD-PROUD (c) 2014 City A.M. |