5 Reasons to Adopt Microsoft Office 365 in Your Environment

Most organizations, big and small, often think of efficiency and productivity as synonyms or two sides of the same coin. Businesses constantly pursue the latest innovations that can help them turn core business operations into routines to improve agility, efficiency and productivity and, of course, reduce costs.

That’s where Microsoft Office 365 comes in. It’s a set of cloud-based applications that include Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Teams. Its cloud-based service provides users with a fantastic set of features and functionalities, all in one place. On top of that, it comes with all the benefits of the cloud! This way, users can access all their files, emails, calendars, contacts, applications and work tasks anytime, anywhere, and from any device, so they never miss a beat.

Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a 21% increase in Microsoft 365 users, and some 70% of Fortune 500 companies have purchased a license in the past year. So the question is do you need to join the community of over 1.5 users worldwide? Let’s look at the top 5 advantages that Microsoft’s productivity suite can deliver for your business.

Scalability and Adaptability

Business changes all the time, and odds are, your business is changing and adapting to the new realities of the marketplace as we speak. As your business changes, the apps and software you use should be able adapt to your business’s needs as well.

Scalability is one of the most praised features of Microsoft Office 365. It can be scaled up or down to ensure your changing business needs are met, and you pay only for the features you use. Moreover, Microsoft Office 365 is a subscription-based cloud service, which means paying an annual or monthly fee per user. Such an approach gives you the freedom to add or remove users/services whenever the need arises or change your current subscription plan to avoid unnecessary costs.

Collaboration and Communication

Members of the same team assigned to different projects and working from other locations can frequently feel separated. Such separation can produce communication barriers among team members working remotely on the same project and result in diminished motivation and lesser involvement in achieving company objectives. These obstacles can negatively impact the collaboration within the team, as well as your business’s productivity and bottom line.

Microsoft Office 365 delivers a unique approach for businesses to stay productive through enhanced collaboration. It no longer matters where you work — with Microsoft Office 365 you have all-time access to all the tools needed to be productive. Now, you no longer have to wait for your documents and files to be checked, edited and approved. Your teammates will be able to monitor modifications in your shared files in real-time and work on them concurrently.

Moreover, Microsoft Office 365 provides very capable tools to enhance communication among your employees, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business, Office Video, OneDrive for Business and others. With this impressive array of tools, your employees can effortlessly share ideas and files and seamlessly collaborate on different projects from various locations across the world.

Remote Work Accessibility

With the Covid-10 outbreak and most companies shifting to working from home to curb the spread of the virus, some concerns have been raised about maintaining employee productivity and efficiency in a remote work setting.

With Microsoft Office 365 running in the cloud, you can see your data and files anywhere, any time and on any device, which means that you can work almost everywhere. As long as you have an internet connection, you get to access your email, files and Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) from any location and any device. This capability greatly benefits companies with remote employees or employees on-the-go, which is the case with a growing number of companies nowadays.

What is more, is that you can work offline on your documents and simply upload them when you’re back online.

Cost Reduction

Microsoft Office 365 is a subscription-based service for which you can choose to pay a monthly or yearly per-user fee, eliminating the need to pay a substantial amount up-front for new software. Moreover, being in the cloud, it is no longer necessary to purchase and maintain server hardware for your emails, file apps or document storage, resulting in less power consumption and less office space for housing servers.

In addition to that, you can turn off the services you don’t use at any time to reduce costs.

Guaranteed Uptime

Microsoft Office 365 runs in the cloud, which means it is not reliant on onsite hardware servers that sometimes fail. For your business to continue operating like a well-oiled machine, the cloud service must be up and running 24/7/365. With Microsoft Office 365, there is little to be concerned about – the company makes extraordinary efforts to ensure 99.9% availability of its infrastructure according to its service-level agreement (SLA).

One last thing to acknowledge is that all of your data will be stored in the cloud, which means that it’s exposed to potential data-loss threats. However, as long as you regularly perform Microsoft Office 365 backups, your business can keep running without interruptions.

NAKIVO Backup for Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is doing its part to ensure your business’s continuity, but there’s one aspect of your cloud data that’s in your hands. Most Microsoft Office 365 users operate under a false assumption that since their data is in the cloud, it is protected by default and accessible at all times, thus putting their entire business data at risk of being compromised or lost.

Business data protection and IT infrastructure availability have always been NAKIVO’s top priorities. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is designed to perform regular incremental backups of your Microsoft Office 365 data and applications. Under this scheme, only the blocks of data that have changed since the last full backup are copied, resulting in shorter backup times and lower storage space requirements.

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication for Microsoft 365, you can easily browse and restore Exchange Online emails, OneDrive for Business files as well as SharePoint Online libraries and lists directly from backups to the original or a custom location. You can also protect thousands of Microsoft Office 365 user accounts with a single deployment of the solution, enabling you to meet the fast-changing requirements of your business.

Moreover, you can put your Microsoft Office 365 backup jobs on auto-pilot to run on schedule with the advanced backup job scheduling feature in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, saving you a great deal of time and effort.

Conclusion

Efficiency is of paramount importance to businesses. Deciding whether to start using Microsoft Office 365 or migrate your on-premises setup to the cloud can be daunting. We believe that Microsoft Office 365 is a highly useful toolset and comes with numerous advantages, crucial for any company. Having a first-class scalable platform that enables seamless collaboration and communication makes any organization more efficient. Moreover, having access to productivity tools that empower people to do their jobs more efficiently and from anywhere in the world makes companies even more agile and allows them to compete alongside other players in their market segment.