With the working environment looking and feeling very different to a year ago, businesses that had already adopted cloud technologies were able to transition to working from home quickly and far more easily, than those with on premise infrastructure.

As a business we’ve seen a big uptake in Office 365. Office 365 is a suite of cloud tools including email, Office applications, Sharepoint Online, Teams and Onedrive For Business. Here are the reasons why a business should migrate to office 365.

1.Work from anywhere and from any device

0365 enhances productivity by enabling employees to gain access to familiar office applications on any device from anywhere, with a single sign on. Whether this is at home, on the train, in a meeting or at the office, your staff can access their email, documents, office applications and calendar easily and securely from one single account.

2.Flexible plans

Office 365 is available in a range of plans, with different price points, so you can choose the plan most suitable for your business needs. These can range from Microsoft 365 Business basic, offering Office applications, Teams, Onedrive For Business and Sharepoint Online, to Microsoft 365 Business Premium where you get the full suite of tools, antivirus and active directory for managing permissions and accessing the company network. Microsoft also provides mix and match plans, so you are only paying for what you need.

3. Enhanced collaboration & communication

With employees being more dispersed, either away from the office or in different departments, Office 365 has a suite of tools to improve communication between employees through chat, meetings and voice. Microsoft Teams allows you to build better relationships with your clients and suppliers and creates a more open environment to share ideas and best practice. You can set up different teams and channels to reflect your organisational structure and to work on specific projects.

With Onedrive For Business & Sharepoint Online you have the freedom of managing your company’s files & folder structure. You can set up policies and permissions for users so only those employees that need to access certain documents have the permissions to do so. Documents can be collaborated on at the same time, with version control so you can see how a document has evolved and go back to any previous version in one click.

4. Overall reduced costs

Available at a fixed price, you can manage your company’s expenditure and know exactly what you are paying for. This allows you to be more agile, scaling up & down as business needs require.

By transacting your Office 365 licenses via a Cloud Solutions Partner like us at Lucid Networks, you can flex your license count (and therefore your spend) up and down to match your actual headcount in your business; while enjoying pricing that’s only available for an annual commitment if you buy your licenses direct from Microsoft.

Moving away from on premise infrastructure allows you to streamline your IT operations by outsourcing the hosting of your critical data to Microsoft’s team of experts with globally resilient infrastructure.

5. Enhanced IT security & data compliance

Microsoft invests heavily in IT security. Mutli factor authentication, single sign on, in-built antivirus, encrypted emails and azure active directory all help to enhance security around Office 365.

For more details around Office 365 features & benefits, and to choose a plan that best suits your business needs, contact us