The Top 5 Reasons Why Businesses are Considering Office 365

It’s not uncommon for firms to have various flavors of Exchange, Lotus Notes and possibly other email, calendaring and collaboration systems in their application inventory. The various overhead costs, financial and human capital alike, can take their toll on the organization. When the London Office is using an older versions of Notes and the Western region of the US is using Exchange 2005, interacting with your peers can become difficult.

Enter Office 365 to the rescue. In this blog, I’ll discuss the top reasons why a company would want to consider moving to the cloud.

Business Drivers

1. Mergers and acquisitions
   Even if M&A isn’t part of a company’s growth strategy, a single merger or acquisition can result in an overhead that creates a set of redundant systems, services and practices.
2. Duplication of roles and responsibilities
   With duplication of systems comes the incumbent supporting roles and responsibilities necessary to maintain and support them. Due to the various flavors of Exchange, Lotus Notes, or open source mail, internal communication can create a barrier to simply determining the best means of managing resources, communicating via distribution groups or collaborating across regions. The centralized Office 365 administration tools, simplified web-based experience, and ability to integrate with a firm’s Active Directory environment simplify this confusion.
3. Competitors are in the cloud
   Many companies have identified the cloud as a competitive advantage and have already earned “first mover” benefits. This encourages more cautious organizations to expedite their own plans to touch their toes in the cloud. The question you should ask yourself is not if but when to move to the cloud
4. Employees have difficulty collaborating
   Water has a tendency to reach its own level. For that reason, it comes as no surprise that end users are leveraging easy-to-obtain cloud services. Office 365 is not different. If an employee sitting client side only has to use a credit card to spin up a SharePoint online service to share files with their various project teams, they are going to. IT is then left with the burden of having to ensure these pockets of “shadow IT” still fall within the boundaries of security and compliance requirements. Office 365 provides the ability better ensure a centralized, well controlled and secure environment.
5. To allow IT to work with the agility of the business
   The pace of business only continues to accelerate. The pace of IT, while increasing, still has yet to be able to keep abreast with the agility of business and their fellow operations teams. As a virtualization and containerization have revitalized the data center, those very same technologies have driven the best practices inherent in Microsoft’s Cloud-based systems and this includes the suite of tools available in Office 365.

The Office suite of productivity apps has long been the de facto standard for document generation for many years. With the emergence of the cloud, the need for IT to act in agile fashion and to ensure your employees have the tools they need to effectively communicate and collaborate, Office 365 has quickly emerged as the standard for web-based email, calendaring, collaboration and so much more.