Moving to a new platform such as Microsoft 365 will usually mean rethinking how your business architecture is structured. Data may be scattered across numerous silos, devices and servers. You may be paying hundreds or thousands of pounds each year for storage, and you may not be getting the most out of employee collaboration.
When considering how best to take advantage of the numerous tools available to you in Microsoft’s productivity suite, it is important to ensure there are solid foundations to build upon. Your architecture needs to support your business strategy. Most businesses now have a combination of on-site, remote, and hybrid workers, so access to your infrastructure needs to support all of these methods of connectivity. As commuting becomes less of a necessity – not least due to the COVID pandemic cementing the fact that office working is no longer essential – taking full advantage of cloud-based services is vital.
The steps you need to consider are therefore: restructuring your business according to your priorities (whether that’s employee retention and wellbeing, data security, and so on), implementing the architecture to support that, and then managing how your data is collected and stored. Products such as SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams all form part of the Modern Work philosophy and all of them are included in Microsoft 365 licencing. SharePoint and OneDrive offer global accessibility and real-time collaboration through cloud-based storage, which means you aren’t hampered with on-premises servers or other costly overheads. Teams brings your people together with online meeting and live chat.
Security architecture is also part of this process. Tools like InTune and Microsoft 365 Defender will allow you to enrol only devices you trust, while fending off potential phishing or ransomware attacks. A cloud-based infrastructure which is dynamically updated provides you with far more robustness than an on-premises equivalent, where you may need to take services offline to install upgrades, security patches, and so on.
There are plenty of other reasons to consider a move to digital, whether that’s fully cloud-based or a hybrid model. Your Information Management architecture needs to be secure but flexible, and OfficeLabs has guided dozens of businesses through this process. Give us a call on 01392 240365 or fill in the Contact Us form below, and we’ll discuss your business model and future goals with you.
If you are also looking for assistance with other aspects of Information Management, click on one of the below links for further information.
