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COVID-19 Pandemic Reinforces Benefits Of Outsourcing

As vividly seen, the rapid outbreak of COVID-19 throughout the world has had a drastic impact on the global economy and overall business environment. 

For many small to large businesses, the virus containment measures taken have shuffled workplaces, declining revenues and in some cases, workforce reductions alongside various other effects. Implications of some impacts are temporary, while others might be long-term. 

In this scenario outsourcing operations is amongst the strongest contingency plans that business leaders must consider in these unprecedented times like these.

Currently, small and medium scale businesses are struggling harder than ever to reduce their overhead expenses while maintaining overall efficiency. As the economic landscape continues to shift, an opportunity has arisen for many businesses who have previously been hesitant to consider outsourcing operations. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront many of the immediate and long-term benefits of outsourcing businesses functions, including:

  • Reduction of costs

The impact of COVID-19 has proven that many workers don’t physically need to be in the office to work effectively — the same goes for outsourced workers or entire departments. Outsourcing few functions reduces costs while adding highly qualified experts with a deep pool of resources, especially in times of crisis and uncertainty. Outsourcing can also mean less stress for business leaders over employee turnover or potential layoffs.

  • Security and efficiency in a virtual workforce

With many employees working from home for the foreseeable future, businesses are forced to quickly implement technology and solutions that will help them best adapt to these new circumstances. In this virtual age, migrating an organization to cloud-based softwares from desktop or server-based software allows business leaders and employees to have secure and remote access instantaneously without any hassles.

  • Increased depth of knowledge and resources

These designated experts are up to date on all the latest regulatory requirements and are continuously monitoring relevant laws and regulations to stay current on processes necessary for their clients. Having a team on call to tackle miscellaneous issues ultimately allows the company leadership to focus on management and core operations essential to business stability in the current environment.

  • Access to scalable technology

More than ever, the pressure is on for business leaders to correctly use insights and  to drive the company performance higher. Outsourced platforms can deliver real-time reports with metrics that matter to a business’s key stakeholders, allowing them to make just informed decisions.

Businesses have various competitive options when it comes to cloud-based outsourcing— it’s not one size fits all. For example, designating data entry tasks through which an outsourced provider can easily maintain a business’s records remotely at a fraction of the cost of hiring someone onsite. Another more robust option is a complete records or customer management solution, where clients have a fully equipped portal. 

In current state business owners are facing greater expectations when it comes to general compliance requirements. For many, the decision to outsource few functions is the first step toward making life easier and processes safer with the added benefits of resource savings, which allow senior leadership extra time to focus on management and core operations to make sound, logical business decisions.

@CloudPloys offers Remote Admin Assistance alongside a Team of dedicated developers and experts that can help streamline the transition of your business into the digital world. 

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WordPress VS Shopify

Shopify or WordPress? 

Which one is better? 

A common confusion that many startups face. So if you find yourself stuck in the same doubt then read on for an in depth comparison of both platforms. @CloudPloys we integrate both platforms and from our experience we have described their key features and the reasons why one platform will serve your business’ needs best over the other when building an e-commerce website. 

But first let’s have a quick overview of both platforms…

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a web application designed to allow businesses to build & launch their own online store. It has a range of pre-integrated templates that can be altered to meet individual businesses’ branding requirements. Both physical and digital goods can be sold here.

The key idea behind Shopify is to enable non-tech users with no design skills to create a store themselves — without any coding. However, Shopify also allows you to edit the HTML and CSS of your website, which means that those who do have coding skills will be able to customize their stores more extensively…Obviously! This skill should never be undervalued.

Shopify is pre-hosted by Shopify’s server, so you don’t need to worry about buying web hosting or installing software. The idea is that pretty much everything you need to build and run your store comes within the package along with the customisation functionality of a Shopify store to meet extra specific requirements through the addition of apps — more on this later. 

Shopify is a software service tool (‘SaaS’) — this means that you don’t own a copy of the software, but instead pay a monthly subscription fee to use it. Also, as it is a web application, it runs on cloud — so, you can manage your store from anywhere & anytime as long as you have access to a web browser and the internet. 

What is WordPress?

There are two different versions of WordPress available:

  1. Hosted WordPress
  2. Self-hosted WordPress

Hosted WordPress — available at wordpress.com — is, like Shopify,  a software service tool (‘SaaS’). You pay a monthly subscription fee to use it and get access to a wide pool of features to build and maintain a website

It’s a less equipped version of Shopify and users need to use third party tools like Ecwid, Woocommerce (or indeed Shopify!) to add e-commerce features to it.

Self-hosted WordPress — a downloadable software from wordpress.org which is then installed on your own web server. It’s open-source, meaning that the code behind it is freely available and can be easily tweaked if the need be. 

This means that sites built with WordPress can be customized to the nth degree — making it an extremely flexible tool that, in the hands of the “right website developer” = “@CloudPloys developer”, or via the installation of the right plugins, can be improvised to meet the requirements of nearly any web design project. 

WordPress can be installed for free on your server, but what one needs to consider is hosting costs, domain registration charges and potential plugin / development costs. 

Our next article called “WordPress Users VS Shopify Users” for more in-depth discussion on this…

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Building technology for success in the digital era

Even before COVID-19, many organizations faced considerable IT challenges and some were even reluctant to adapt and preferred to stay intact with their conservative methods. Now, COVID-19 is pushing companies to rapidly operate in new ways and IT solutions have become the utter need of the hour. Businesses are facing a crucial dilemma as they must act quickly to address an unforeseen functioning change and lay a foundation for a smoother tomorrow which is more robust & resilient― business running risks, operational changes, fast decision-making, workforce output, security challenges.  As we reach the other side of this pandemic, it will be essential to establish long-term strategies and be ever ready to be able to absorb any future disruptions with greater resilience. Every business needs to apply lessons learned from this experience and build a flexible operational infrastructure and a dynamic talent roadmap involving a balanced mix of “remote employee” & “traditional employee”.
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How to build a resilient business foundation?

How to build a resilient business foundation?  In our previous article about “Building technology for success in the digital era” we talked about “Resilient business foundation”, but how can you develop that for your business? Here we have six building blocks that you need to work on to achieve concrete resilience for your business in the digital era. ‘Concrete resilience = Healthy business foundation’.
  1. Dynamic Digital Workplace
Enable remote work with a focus on technologies, communications and policies—at extraordinary speed and scale.
  • Help employees get comfortable with remote working (e.g. effectively run virtual meetings).
  • Develop & upgrade collaboration systems and provide guidance for operating in a remote workplace.
  • Build a dynamic digital workplace task force including business, HR, IT and security leaders.
  • Create a mix of traditional desktop workers with internal as well as external mix of employees and implement virtual desktop solutions.
  • Source cost efficient solutions by developing ties with external companies to avoid solely relying on your employees.
  1. Invest in Automation
Increase automation investments to mitigate the impact of systems disruption, optimise human resource capacity and streamline IT workforce management.
  • Identify and fathom bottleneck areas.
  • Implement automation to immediately resolve high-volume tasks by leveraging technology.
  • Augment that which cannot be completely automated with digital co-workers by striking a balanced mix of in-house and out-house staff for greater flexibility.
  • Optimise the arrangement of human resources to focus on core activities.
  1. Business Infrastructure & Performance Engineering
Identify & address critical systems needs and performance constraints and direct efforts to meet business demand.
  • Set up a high to low priority flow chart to address crucial needs and barriers.
  • Identify and implement performance engineering solutions such as optimising data-indexing, application memory, architecture-caching and more.
  • Scale application capabilities through configuration or commercial changes.
  • Apply dynamic architecture remediation techniques, such as streaming data, to offload demand on critical systems.
  1. Accelerate Cloud Transition & Optimisation
Manage demand fluctuations, risk, action instant innovation and optimise cloud costs.
  • Analyse digital activities to maximise capacity for critical applications and tech infrastructure.
  • Leverage the power of cloud to deploy instant innovation through new cloud-native solutions.
  • Implement cloud’s pay-by-the-drink model to align technology costs to drops in demand. This model is a pay-as-you-go, variable cost model with no up-front fees that scales along with demand, an approach that works well for a wide range of scenarios and companies.
  1. Business Operation Continuity
Source and onboard skilled resources to support critical services and deliver new IT projects.
  • Ascertain right skilled resources and initiate knowledge transition.
  • Accelerate service readiness.
  • Sustain service continuity through suitable modern engineering practices and lean IT governance.
  1. Cybersecurity
Protect your Intellectual property, clients and databases wherever they might from unwanted attacks and times of crisis.
  • Implement a Zero Trust model for multi-cloud solutions, individually-owned devices (BYOD) and third-party technologies.
  • Identify security abnormalities and events.
  • Institute daily virtual situational threat intelligence briefings.
  • Train employees and stakeholders to be vigilant about cyber threat tactics.
Develop analytics and automation monitoring solutions.