With more people working from home and connecting back to the office due to the pandemic, many small businesses have made the leap to business-grade fibre – which makes it easier for them to create secure connections with remote workers and between offices.
“Taking advantage of services in the cloud takes a lot of the complexity out of remotely working effectively as a team. All your people can securely access all the tools they need from any device, in any location,” Rouicheq says.
“Moving your key business systems to the cloud offers a range of other business benefits, from reducing complexity and consolidating applications to simplifying support and enhancing end-to-end security.”
These innovative technologies lay a solid foundation for small businesses looking to embrace more sophisticated cloud-based communication tools, such as unified communications as a service.
New world order
The flexibility to keep remote workforces connected and productive is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits for small businesses, says Peter Hughes, Regional Vice President with global cloud communications solutions provider RingCentral.
In an era of BYOD, unified communications allows businesses to easily allocate phone numbers to different devices and retain those numbers as employees change roles or leave the business.
Providers like RingCentral also make it easier for businesses to seamlessly integrate their communication tools with their line of business applications such as helpdesk and customer relationship management.
The true value of this technology is not just bringing existing communication tools into the digital age, it is about integrating them with other workflows to unlock productivity, Hughes says.
“For many years, this kind of integration was so complex and expensive that it remained out of reach for small businesses,” he says.
“Once you embrace the cloud, tying it all together and administering it becomes much simpler – through out-of-the-box integration with a wealth of business tools like Salesforce, HubSpot and Zendesk.”
Likewise, the simple per user, per month pricing model of RingCentral’s cloud services eliminates the traditionally prohibitive upfront expenses which kept these tools out of the hands of many small businesses.
“At this point, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got 10 users or 10,000 users, your business is ready to make the most of the latest innovations,” Hughes says.
“This kind of innovative technology can be transformative for a small business looking to tackle big challenges.”
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact centre solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone™ (MVP™) global platform. More flexible and cost effective than on-premises PBX systems, RingCentral empowers mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect from any device. RingCentral Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform includes team messaging, video meetings, and cloud phone system. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third-party business applications to easily customise business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.
