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Today we’ll examine some of the biggest business technology innovations that can help your organization keep its talent happy and its culture healthy. These recommendations will take into account the physical workspace of your company and how technology will influence the user’s satisfaction.

Provide the Technology to Fit the Workspace
Depending on the business, you might have a space that is conducive to a more mobile type of working style. Give your employees the technology to take advantage of their workspace, whether it’s a desktop or laptop. While the traditional work desk is still quite common in the workplace, open offices are gaining traction, and open areas where employees can work when they need to get away from others to focus or hunker down on a task can be provided to ensure employees can work on their own terms while still maintaining productivity.

Make It Easy for Employees to Use their Devices
A Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy can be a great boon for your business. For one, it keeps your organization from investing in company devices when they aren’t needed. You can just have your employees use their own devices for work purposes as long as they adhere to your organization’s policy regarding data security. The ideal BYOD policy will respect your employees’ ability to work as needed while also maintaining the right to remotely wipe devices and apply permissions to whitelist or blacklist apps.

Properly Maintain Technology Systems
Nothing is more irritating for workers than technology that doesn’t work. Even a task like checking your email can be held up by a workstation that is too slow or not configured properly. To this end, preventative maintenance and management is critical, as you can make sure technology stays in proper working order before it becomes a major issue for your employees. If you can’t take proper care of your technology, employees will wonder why you can’t make their jobs a priority for your business, and it can reflect in their work performance.

Digital Seattle can help you both implement and maintain technology in a way that is effective for retaining employees. To learn more about our remote monitoring and management solutions, as well as Bring Your Own Device policies, reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.

Return on investment is basically a way of saying that whatever you’re investing in is actually creating results for your organization. It’s the difference between spending a considerable amount of time on a task with an expensive technology or spending even longer without one. It’s working smarter, not harder. It all comes down to calculating whether the investment you’ve made on a technology solution generates enough revenue to justify making the investment it in the first place.

Here’s how you too can calculate the return on investment for just about any technology solution your business might consider down the line.

Basic Return on Investment
At its most basic level, return on investment boils down to the following equation:

ROI = ((Net Gain) / Cost) * 100

Net gain is determined by a couple of factors, including how much you spend and how much you wind up with afterward. Therefore, if you spend $20 and make $40, your net gain would be $20.

ROI = (20/20) * 100 = 100%

This places the ROI at a 100%, effectively doubling the amount of money you’ve invested.

Net Gain and Costs Aren’t Always Easy to Determine
Of course, net gain for businesses isn’t always going to be this easy to figure out. You have all kinds of operating costs, implementation costs, payroll, opportunity cost, and so on, all of which can directly influence how much return on investment you will get from a particular solution. If you are thinking about implementing a new piece of technology, you’ll have to think about how much time is spent on a task now, how much time could be saved, and what the initial cost of implementation will be.

This might be overwhelming to some, but it’s not impossible to figure out. After all, you have the technology experts at Digital Seattle to rely on. For help determining if your next IT implementation will yield a positive return on investment, reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.

Costs
The cloud has been available to businesses for a long time, even if they haven’t known about it. It just wasn’t as widespread or well-known as it has been since Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service became popular. The biggest contributing factor that affected how useful cloud computing was to businesses at the time was the cost. The cost decreased as the services became more popular making it more accessible than ever before. Of course, there is always that inherent risk of security when hosting data on someone else’s infrastructure, and these risks can make the return on investment of a cloud solution less than appealing.

These risks make it more enticing for businesses to implement a private cloud strategy. While it might be far more complicated due to calculating both fixed and recurring costs, it stands to reason that it could be a valuable investment. A private cloud requires that your organization be responsible for hardware costs, management, control, and so much more, meaning that there is a lot more that could go wrong compared to having someone else host your cloud-based services and data.

When implementing something as important as a cloud solution, it’s critical that you look at all of the small details to ensure a private cloud is what your business needs. Consider the costs of migration and operation, but remember that it might be necessary to improve part of your business’ operations.

Integration
It’s likely that your organization already uses public cloud applications, and it’s perfectly likely that they will work better or are more efficient if you leave them where they are. Using public cloud resources for non-critical infrastructure or applications can give your business the computing environment it needs. This would mean that your private cloud and public cloud resources would be integrated seamlessly.

Your hybrid cloud platform would take some setup, but it would be well worth the implementation due to its ease of access. Essentially, you create a cloud system that is accessed through one single access portal. You can add security provisions and configurations that allow you to keep data as safe as possible, but it will require more effort to include.

Time
There is another major hurdle that must be cleared by businesses that want to move their IT into a private cloud, and that’s the sheer amount of time it takes. Dedicated virtual environments for your business’ assets are more feature-rich and robust than public cloud-based applications, but on the other hand, issues related to hardware and other on-premise technology can eat up a lot of time and expenses. Your IT department would be responsible for configuring and migrating any and all relevant data to the virtual machines, as well as addressing any issues regarding maintenance and management.

This is where we come in. Digital Seattle can help your business implement a private cloud model without a comprehensive on-site IT department. To learn more, reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.