The world is changing so fast today. Nothing that we knew, could have prepared us for the Covid-19 pandemic, and as such, a lot of our beliefs, methods of doing things and expectations of the future suddenly changed.
For those running businesses, the disruptive impact of the pandemic was amplified by the fact that their competitors quickly adapted and found more resilient ways of operating.
Today, businesses that seem to be recovering well from the Covid-19 disruptions are those that have lower overheads and hold greater sway over customers because they have implemented online and other digital technologies. They offer faster services, require fewer people to run their operations owing to the adoption of modern technologies, and are better at learning and evaluating the cost of their decisions because they can record everything automatically.
This is the anatomy of the advantages businesses get when using technology. However, many business owners still lack the skills or the knowhow to implement and run certain technologies, including productivity software, cybersecurity, professional emails, and many other solutions that may give them that advantage.
Meanwhile, this article discusses the merits of the various sets of solutions that could transform your business.
1. Cloud solutions
With the rising cost of electricity, long gone are the days when businesses had to keep physical servers, which are not only costly to acquire, maintain, and protect, but also require personnel to manage them. Bigfivehost.com identified this challenge and created a suite offering support with easy-to-use cloud solutions, including the following:
Domain and email hosting
This enables businesses to have a professional online outlook, which will attract more trust. You will enjoy a branded web presence with a www.yourbrand.co.ke domain and yourname@yourbrand.co.ke for professional emails.
Microsoft 365 tools
Microsoft 365 offers a variety of collaboration and productivity tools for your team. It’s a great start to building a digital business, since it provides a range of solutions, from email through Microsoft Outlook, to PowerPoint presentation software, Excel for spreadsheets, SharePoint for storing and sharing documents for approval, OneDrive to automatically store and back up your files, and Teams for setting up virtual meetings. All these can be accessed with one simple monthly subscription. There is no set up cost, and no need for teams to run the software. Everything is accessed securely from the cloud.
Google Workspace
Much like the Microsoft 365 suite, the Google Workspace offers a variety of collaboration and productivity tools, such as Google Sheets to analyse data, Gmail for business, Google Chat for collaboration, Google Drive for backing up files, Google Docs for editing business documents and Google Meet for setting up virtual meetings.
Google workspace will also enable you to create branded domains that you can use for your business online. All you need to maintain this whole set-up is a small monthly fee for each employee within your organisation, with the added benefit of economies of scale for larger organisations.
Virtual, cloud servers and recovery
These are a great alternative to the bulky physical server solutions that costs a lot of money, and which offer little protection once your physical servers get compromised or damaged. Virtual servers offer remote control of a physical server held and managed under the best-in-class standards within a world-class facility. This means that although you only pay a fraction of the cost, you now get the added benefit of high-level security, well-managed storage, back-up and hosting platform, and a great recovery solution that ensures your business stays resilient against disasters.
2. Cybersecurity Solutions
Let’s face it. Cybercrime is big, and it is likely to keep growing. This is because adoption of digital technologies is picking up. Many enterprises still consider antivirus software an additional expense they could do without, yet this will continue exposing their networks to the spread of malicious software.
For any organisation with a presence online and sizeable staff, cybersecurity is very important, since every employee raises the factor of risk just by owning and using a smart phone, office laptop or computer.
In 2021 alone, threats like Ransomware, where an attacker blocks access to all your systems or core websites until a certain amount is paid to him or her, went up 180 percent. Ransomware remains one of the most damaging digital threats.
Many organisations may not have the talent or resources to keep a cybersecurity team, but Safaricom Business can use its cybersecurity team to provide world-class service at a fraction of the cost it would take to build an entire cybersecurity infrastructure.
Other cybersecurity services
Smart Surveillance
Ordinary CCTV systems have to be observed to identify security breaches, and in most cases, it may be too late and the breach will have already happened. However, it is now possible to add an artificial intelligence and machine learning layer that can identify risky activity and trespass issues, such as when unauthorised personnel access restricted sections of the premises, among other breaches.
A smart surveillance solution can identify faces, and can also be taught to spot suspicious activity and alert admin or company security teams before too much damage is done. It may also be used to identify patterns and insights into movement around different areas of your premise.
All of these can be achieved without having to change your current CCTV infrastructure, but by having your footage sent to a central server that processes it in real-time. Safaricom Business provides expert consultants to guide you through the process and make it all possible.
Unified threat management
Unified threat management provides a managed firewall service that can protect your systems from intrusion and snooping. Access to your organisation’s core technology infrastructure will be controlled with each device or access request being monitored, before it is authorised. For example, if anyone wanted to get access to your servers by sending malicious software to one of your employees, our firewall will be able to deter such a threat with ease. This is a service that can be delivered on your present technology stack with minimal interference to your business operations.
SSL certificates
SSL certificates are crucial today because they authenticate a website and let users who are trying to access it know that it is safe. SSL certificates have become so essential in how businesses rank online, that it becomes almost impossible to get your business on the first page of search results if its website and other digital assets are unverified by the major search engines like Google, Bing and others.
SSL certificates from Safaricom Business make browsers to trust your website. This means your customers will be confident that there will be less chances of getting hacked and their information stolen.
Usually, secure websites will have a small padlock sign to the left of the URL.
Security threat management
This allows your business to be resilient against online threats. Every minute, thousands of Petabytes of data get uploaded onto the internet. With this consistent influx of data, newer threats find their way into the devices that are held and operated by various users. As a result, your business needs to be ever vigilant to protect itself from every new iteration of malicious software on the internet. To do so, you will need a full team to manage DNS settings, VPN settings, active antivirus threat detection, and many other platforms that are necessary to maintain such vigilance.
Security professional services
Sometimes you or your business partners may have huge growth ambitions. As such, you may target digital transformation to help your business scale up. Without the right advice, you could be building a platform that will be a hotbed of cyberattacks, revenue leaks and unhappy customers. This is the reason your business may need a security professional to advice on the protections your business requires at every stage.
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