Ostratto - Blog | Ostratto #cloud

What Is ZTNA? A Simple Guide for Small and Medium Businesses

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:33:00 +0000

Cybersecurity used to be simple: if you were inside the office network, you were trusted. If you were outside, you weren’t. That approach no longer works. Staff now work from home, use personal devices, and rely on cloud apps rather than office servers. Hackers have also grown more sophisticated, often exploiting stolen passwords or unsecured endpoints.

This shift has led to the rise of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) - a modern security model that assumes no user or device should be trusted by default, whether they’re inside or outside the company network.

What Exactly Is ZTNA?

ZTNA replaces the old “castle-and-moat” idea of cybersecurity with identity-based access. Instead of giving users broad access to your network once they log in (like with a traditional VPN), ZTNA applies strict, dynamic rules:

Never trust, always verify – Every login attempt and every device is continuously checked.
Least privilege access – Users only get access to the specific apps or resources they need, nothing more.
Context-aware decisions – Access can depend on factors like device security, location, or time of day.

In short, ZTNA makes sure the right person, on the right device, gets the right level of access - and nothing slips through the cracks.

How ZTNA Works in Practice

Unlike VPNs, which give users access to the whole network, ZTNA is more precise, reducing the risk of attackers moving around if they do break in.

A staff member tries to log into a company system (say, Zoho CRM).

ZTNA verifies their identity (username, MFA) and checks the device they’re using.

If everything matches company policy, ZTNA grants access to just that application.

If something looks unusual - such as logging in from an unknown device or country - access may be denied or additional checks required.

	ZTNA	VPN
Security Approach	Follows “zero trust” - no one is trusted by default.	Creates a secure tunnel for the entire network. Trusted once inside.
Access Control	Limits access to only the specific resources required.	Grants full access to the network once connected.
User Experience	Web-based, easier setup, and usually provides smoother access.	Requires software installation; may slow down internet speeds.
Scalability	Easier to scale, especially in cloud environments.	Can face performance issues with more users.
Location of Access	Focuses on granting access to specific apps/services.	Provides access to the entire internal network remotely.

Benefits of ZTNA for SME's

Adopting Zero Trust Network Access doesn’t just modernise your security - it brings practical advantages for smaller organisations. By moving away from broad, “all-or-nothing” network access, ZTNA helps SMEs work more securely, efficiently, and flexibly, especially in today’s cloud-driven and remote-working environments.

Stronger Security

Reduces the risk of stolen credentials being used to gain broad network access. Limits “lateral movement” - attackers can’t roam freely once inside.

Better Remote Experience

Staff connect directly to the apps they need, without slow VPN tunnels back to the office.

Simpler IT Management

Centralised control means you can enforce consistent policies for office staff, remote workers, and contractors.

Supports Compliance

Helps demonstrate strong access controls, which is key for GDPR and industry audits.

Scales Easily

Adding new users, apps, or locations doesn’t require new hardware - it’s cloud-delivered.

How SMEs Can Get Started with ZTNA

Audit your current access model – Who is accessing what systems, from where, and on which devices?
Start small – Pilot ZTNA on one cloud app or a subset of users first.
Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) – This is a foundation for ZTNA.
Choose the right vendor – Look for solutions with UK/EU data centres, simple integrations with your tools (Zoho, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), and SME-friendly pricing.
Work with a trusted partner – If you don’t have in-house expertise, a consultancy can help you design policies and roll out ZTNA smoothly.

ZTNA represents a major shift in cybersecurity - from trusting by default to verifying everything. For SMEs, it offers a practical way to protect remote workers, secure cloud apps, and stay ahead of modern threats without adding huge complexity.

In short: ZTNA helps ensure only the right people, using the right devices, can access your business systems. And in a world where breaches often start with a single stolen password, that’s a huge step forward.

What's SASE? The Future of Secure Networking for SMEs

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 11:23:27 +0000

The way businesses work has changed. With more staff working remotely, cloud apps replacing on-premise servers, and cyber threats growing more complex, traditional IT security models are struggling to keep up. This is where SASE (pronounced “sassy”) comes in.

SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge, and it’s being called the future of networking and security. But what exactly is it - and what does it mean for small and medium-sized businesses?

Breaking Down SASE: The Basics

At its core, SASE is about combining network security and connectivity into one cloud-delivered service. Traditionally, businesses would:

Connect users to a central office network (via VPNs or firewalls).
Route internet and app traffic back through that office for security checks.

This worked when everyone sat in the same office. But with cloud apps (like Zoho, Microsoft 365, or Google Workspace) and hybrid work, this model slows everything down and leaves gaps in protection.

SASE flips the model:

Security is delivered from the cloud edge, not your office.
Users connect securely to the nearest SASE “point of presence” (POP), wherever they are.
The service combines network performance and security features in one.

The Core Components of SASE

A true SASE platform usually bundles together:

SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) - Improves connectivity by routing traffic intelligently over multiple internet paths (rather than relying on a single VPN tunnel).
Secure Web Gateway (SWG) - Filters web traffic, blocking malicious sites and enforcing browsing policies.
Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) - Provides visibility and control over cloud apps (e.g. who’s accessing Zoho CRM from where, and what they’re doing).
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) - Replaces old VPNs with identity-based access. Users only get access to what they need, and nothing more.
Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) - Cloud-based firewalls to protect against unauthorised access and threats.

Why SASE Matters for SMEs

Large enterprises were the first adopters, but SMEs stand to benefit greatly because:

Simplified IT - Instead of juggling separate VPNs, firewalls, and security tools, SASE consolidates them into one cloud service.
Scalable - Adding new staff, locations, or devices is easier. No need to buy more hardware firewalls for every site.
Better experience for remote workers - Staff connect directly to the nearest SASE node for faster, safer access to apps.
Cost control - A single subscription model can replace multiple expensive IT systems and maintenance costs.
Future-proofing - Cybersecurity regulations and customer expectations are rising; SASE helps SMEs show they take data protection seriously.

Real-World Example

Imagine your business has:

An office in Bristol
A handful of remote staff around the UK
Teams using Zoho, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Teams daily

With SASE

Everyone connects to the nearest secure cloud edge.
All traffic is encrypted, scanned, and routed optimally.
Security policies are applied consistently, whether someone is at home, in the office, or on the road.

Without SASE

Remote users connect to the office via VPN, slowing everything down.
Security tools may be inconsistent across devices.

Challenges to Consider

While SASE offers a modern approach to networking and security, it’s not entirely a “switch it on and forget it” solution. For SMEs, the promise of simplified management, cost savings, and stronger protection is attractive - but it comes with practical hurdles. SMEs should be aware of:

Vendor Choice

Different providers bundle features differently. Some focus more on SD-WAN, others on security.

Migration Planning

Moving from traditional firewalls/VPNs to SASE takes careful rollout.

Connectivity Reliance

As SASE is cloud-delivered, you need reliable internet to benefit fully.

SASE is still maturing, but adoption is accelerating. Gartner predicts that by 2028, the majority of businesses will have a SASE strategy in place. For SMEs, the decision often comes down to timing:

If you’re planning a network refresh, moving to more remote/hybrid working, or want to simplify your IT stack, now is a good time to evaluate SASE.
If your current security tools are working and budgets are tight, start by exploring Zero Trust and cloud-delivered firewalls - key stepping stones toward SASE.

SASE is more than another tech acronym. It’s a shift in how businesses connect and protect their people, apps, and data in a cloud-first world. For SMEs, it offers a way to get enterprise-grade security and performance without the enterprise-grade cost or complexity.

In short: SASE brings together networking and security in the cloud, making your business more secure, more flexible, and better prepared for the future of work.

Exploring SASE as an option for your environment? We'd love to help!

Streamline Your Workflow with the 10 Best Zoho Apps

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 21:32:13 +0000

A useful guide that you can use to learn about Zoho, understand what software they have on offer, and find out how these products can be used to add value and streamline your workflow. We've made things simple for you with access to a free trial for each product in the list.

What is Zoho?

Zoho Corporation is a software company that offers a unique and powerful suite of tools that can help you transform the way you work. It was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in Pleasanton, California, and now operates across the world with offices in London, Austin, Beijing, Tokyo, and Chennai. They have developed a wide range of tools to make an impact on every aspect of your business, with products designed to be user-friendly and applicable for all.

Here at Ostratto, we love to use Zoho One, as it encompasses all of the cloud software available with Zoho on one platform. It helps us to manage business operations across the company, and streamline the way that we work. I’m writing this blog to offer you some more information about different Zoho products and outline the ten best apps that we use every day at Ostratto, to help you understand how they can be a helpful addition to your software suite.

Featured Products

#1: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an industry-leading tool, and has been for many years, with an extensive feature set offered at competitive pricing. It’s highly customisable, uses omnichannel communications, offers sales and marketing automations, uses artificial intelligence, and even has its own mobile app.

Learn More About Zoho CRM

#2: Zoho Books

Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting platform that is designed for growing businesses, and it’s recognised by HMRC for its VAT integration. It has an extensive feature set that allows you to create quotes, invoices, sales orders, and bills with ease, and an advanced set of reporting measures to help you make the most of your finances.

Learn More About Zoho Books

#3: Zoho Expense

Zoho Expense streamlines the expense management process with a mobile-first approach, understanding that most of its users will upload their information on-the-go. It’s fully customisable with many controls for administrators, which helps you to keep track of everyone’s expenses and ensure that they comply with company policy.

Learn More About Zoho Expense

#4: Zoho Inventory

Zoho Inventory helps you to track inventory across multiple warehouses, synchronise stock to sell across multiple channels, and manage order fulfilment with extensive shipping functions. It has many integrations to help you connect both sales and shipping platforms, and reporting functions that help you to stay on top of your operations.

Learn More About Zoho Inventory

#5: Zoho People

Zoho People is a Human Resource Management (HRM) software that has been designed to make managing your employees simple and efficient. It can help you to track the attendance, performance, and development of all your employees, with accessible enterprise-level functionality at an affordable price.

Learn More About Zoho People

#6: Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects has an extensive feature set, helping you to manage and coordinate complex projects with ease. You can view timescales on Gantt charts, track hours with timesheets, and automate tasks to streamline your workflow. You can even manage projects on the go with its mobile app!

Learn More About Zoho Projects

#7: Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a completely customisable service desk that will help you manage customer queries across your portfolio. It has many comprehensive integrations with communications platforms, including social media, and uses artificial intelligence to help you create responses quickly.

Learn More About Zoho Desk

#8: Zoho Forms

Zoho Forms can help you to create visually appealing forms with custom branding to efficiently collect and manage information. You can automate forms to send notifications once they're completed, and automatically link info with contacts in your CRM, saving you time.

Learn More About Zoho Forms

#9: Zoho Voice

Zoho Voice is an easy-to-use business telephony and call centre solution that integrates easily with CRM and Desk. You can use it to make and receive business calls on customisable phone numbers with excellent line quality and great mobile capabilities.

Learn More About Zoho Voice

#10: Zoho Sign

Zoho Sign can transform your paperwork with its digital signature solution, helping you to save time and money. You can create reusable templates with custom branding, bulk send documents and track their progress, and create workflows to automate document flow.

Learn More About Zoho Sign

#1: Zoho CRM

What does Zoho CRM do?

Zoho CRM is an industry-leading tool, and has been for many years, with an extensive feature set offered at competitive pricing. It’s highly customisable, uses omnichannel communications, offers sales and marketing automations, uses artificial intelligence, and a mobile app.

Why do we like Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is an ideal solution for small-to-medium businesses looking to get their hands on enterprise-level software at an affordable price. It’s highly customisable with an extensive feature set, meaning that you can choose from a wide range of features and make it work for you.

Why it's Great for Marketing

Why it's Great for Sales

Why it's Great for Managers

Why it's Great for Marketing

As with most Zoho products, its CRM integrates well with other software and this can be very advantageous. If you connect your mailbox to Zoho CRM it will collect all the information you have on each lead and add it to their profile. You can send emails directly from the CRM, and their data will be tracked for you to review. It makes it easy to see how effective your marketing is, and track which leads are engaging with your content.

Why it's Great for Sales

Streamlining your sales process has never been easier, with the ability to create workflow automations that start with lead creation and end with you closing the deal. You can set these up in any way you like, to ensure that you never leave a lead behind. It’s simple to import new leads, with a straightforward process and many integrations. You can also customise the way you view your sales process, with both list view and kanban options.

Why it's Great for Managers

Zoho’s enterprise-level data security can help you to stay compliant with data regulation without any extra work. You can create departments and set rules to configure the view for each team member, ensuring that they remain focused on their work and only access to relevant information. Zoho CRM also has extensive analytics and reporting to help you track the performance of your team, and see where you need to improve.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Highly Customisable Interface

✔ Omnichannel Communications In-App

✔ Comprehensive Workflow Automations

✔ Simple Lead Importing

✔ Enhanced Privacy Protections

How to get started with Zoho CRM

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho CRM Free Trial

#2: Zoho Books

What does Zoho Books do?

Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting platform that has been designed for growing businesses, with extensive features and advanced reporting capabilities. It is a HMRC recognised accounting software that can help you be compliant with the MTD (Making Tax Digital) initiative and save time with the ability to pay your VAT directly through Zoho Books. Its features include workflow automation, time tracking for projects, and inventory management. You can report on anything to do with your company’s finances, with an extensive set of preset reports and the ability to make your own custom ones too.

Why do we like Zoho Books?

Zoho Books is an excellent platform for making new sales, with simple access to all the forms that you need throughout the customer journey. You can share access to these directly with customers through Zoho Books, saving time and simplifying the process. We love the amount of currencies available, offering support for international transactions, and the expansive number of languages supported too. It has an expansive set of integrations, with the ability to work with over 50 external applications, meaning that Zoho Books can work around you, and communicate with most software.

What are its Key Features?

✔ HMRC Recognised Software

✔ Comprehensive Feature Set

✔ Customizable Records and Forms

✔ Multi-Currency and Multi-Language

✔ Expansive Integrations (50+)

✔ Access via Mobile App

✔ Customer Portal Included

How to get started with Zoho Books

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Books Free Trial

#3: Zoho Expense

What does Zoho Expense do?

Zoho Expense streamlines the expense management process with a mobile-first approach, understanding that most of its users will upload their information on-the-go from iOS, Android, and Windows devices. It’s fully customisable with many controls for administrators, which will help you to keep track of everyone’s expenses and ensure that they are compliant with your organisation's policies.

Why do we like Zoho Expense?

Zoho anticipated that most employees looking to be reimbursed for expenses will be looking to do so on their mobile devices, recording their expense receipts on the go. We love the ability to capture receipts using the Zoho Expense app. It also has a useful Chrome Extension that allows you to capture receipts on your webpage with a couple of clicks, streamlining the process for when you make new bookings.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Extensive Integrations

✔ Modern Mobile Application

✔ Company Card Integration

✔ Great Customisation

✔ Advanced Reporting

How to get started with Zoho Expense

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Expense Free Trial

#4: Zoho Inventory

What does Zoho Inventory do?

Zoho Inventory helps you track inventory across multiple warehouses, synchronise stock to sell across multiple channels, and manage order fulfilment with extensive shipping functions. It has integrations that help you to connect both sales and shipping platforms, and reporting functions that help you to stay on top of your operations.

Why do we like Zoho Inventory?

We like Zoho Inventory as it enables you to manage your stock across multiple websites, easily transfer stock between those warehouses, and ship orders from multiple warehouses in the same order. It supports multiple currencies and dropshipping, making it an asset for any organisation looking for a better way to manage their inventory.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Extensive Shipping Functions

✔ Supports e-Commerce

✔ Tracks Across Multiple Warehouses

✔ Manage Sales & Purchase Orders In-App

✔ Great Reporting Options

How to get started with Zoho Inventory

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Inventory Free Trial

#5: Zoho People

What does Zoho People do?

Zoho People is a Human Resource Management (HRM) software that has been designed to make managing your employees more simple and efficient. It can help you to track the attendance, performance, and development of all employees, with accessible enterprise-level functionality to streamline your management processes.

Why do we like Zoho People?

We love Zoho People for its expansive feature set and easy user interface. Its functions cover every possible use-case for HRMs, with efficient time tracking and management systems. It’s ideal for small businesses looking to streamline their expansion, and medium businesses who want a more complete picture of their workforce.

Why it's Great for Managers

Why it's Great for Employees

Why it's Great for Managers

Managers who use Zoho People are able to set up the software to company specifications and then take a backseat on the HRM process, with easy-to-use self-service portals for employees doing most of the work for you. You can track attendance, time spent across projects, and annual leave seamlessly, allowing you to focus on reaching your business goals through the comprehensive performance management functions. You can schedule appraisals, create goals, and receive feedback easily.

Why it's Great for Employees

Employees have complete control over their attendance, leave, and time tracking with Zoho People. They can change any personal information with its self-service functions, manage their calendar and workload across multiple Zoho apps, and view everything they need to know about their employment in a handy branded portal. Most of these functions can be done in the Zoho People mobile app too, allowing employees to update their information on-the-go with ease.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Employee Self-Service Portal

✔ Timesheets & Time Tracking

✔ Efficient Performance Management

✔ HR Process Automation

✔ Extensive Reporting & Analytics

✔ Mobile App for Employees

How to get started with Zoho People

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho People Free Trial

#6: Zoho Projects

What does Zoho Projects do?

Zoho Projects has an extensive feature set for an affordable price, helping you to manage and coordinate projects across your company with ease. You can view timescales on Gantt charts, track hours worked with timesheets, and automate tasks to streamline your workflow.

Why do we like Zoho Projects?

We love Zoho Projects for its excellent feature set, such as Gantt charts, tasks, reporting, documents, and milestones. You’re able to track time against each task within a project, which can be attributed to your Zoho People & Books for time management and accurate project costing.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Gantt Chart / Kanban / Task List Views

✔ Task Allocation & Time Tracking

✔ Mobile Application (iOS & Android)

✔ Collaboration Functions

✔ Reporting & Analytics

How to get started with Zoho Projects

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Projects Free Trial

#7: Zoho Desk

What does Zoho Desk do?

Zoho Desk is a completely customisable service desk that will help you manage customer queries across your organisation’s portfolio. It has comprehensive integrations with communications platforms, and uses artificial intelligence to help you create responses quickly.

Why do we like Zoho Desk?

We love Zoho Desk as it helps us to manage customer service tickets with ease, through convenient contextual support, AI assistance, and detailed analytics. It’s ideal for small businesses looking for enterprise-level customer service capabilities at an affordable price.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Customisable Performance Dashboards

✔ Self-Service Portal for Customers

✔ Knowledge Base for Customers

✔ Automatic Ticket Routing

✔ Mobile App Support

How to get started with Zoho Desk

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Desk Free Trial

#8: Zoho Forms

What does Zoho Forms do?

Zoho Forms can help you to create visually appealing forms with custom branding to efficiently collect and manage information. You can automate these forms to send notifications once completed, and automatically link information with contacts in your CRM.

Why do we like Zoho Forms?

We like Zoho Forms because it allows us to create highly functional branded forms with its easy to use no-code creator, with an array of fields to choose from, field validation to ensure accurate data is recorded, and full customizability to meet most business requirements.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Full Customisation & Branding

✔ No-Code Form Creation

✔ Secure Data Collection

✔ Comprehensive Integrations

✔ Reporting & Analytics

How to get started with Zoho Forms

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Forms Free Trial

#9: Zoho Voice

What does Zoho Voice do?

Zoho Voice is an easy-to-use business telephony and call centre solution that integrates seamlessly with CRM and Desk. You can use it to make and receive business calls on customisable phone numbers with excellent line quality and mobile capabilities.

Why do we like Zoho Voice?

We love Zoho Voice for its integration with other Zoho products. It can communicate with Zoho CRM to identify and recognise phone numbers, record voicemail messages and important conversations, and create notifications to bring your attention to new inbound leads.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Inbound & Outbound Calls

✔ Call Queueing, Forwarding, Transfers

✔ Personal & Departmental Extensions

✔ Customizable Phone Numbers

✔ Call Centre Capabilities

✔ Simple Dialling System

How to get started with Zoho Voice

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho CRM Free Trial

#10: Zoho Sign

What does Zoho Sign do?

Zoho Sign can transform your company’s paperwork with its digital signature solution, helping you to save time and money. You can create reusable templates with custom branding, bulk send documents and track their progress, and create workflows to automate document flow. It's highly secure too, with comprehensive encryption technology.

Why do we like Zoho Sign?

We like Zoho Sign because it helps to streamline signature collection and document processing in a secure and reliable way. It helps you save time through template creation and workflow configuration, and you can track the progress for each document sent easily. It’s compliant with many e-signature laws across the world.

What are its Key Features?

✔ Leading Data Security

✔ Completely Custom Branding

✔ e-Signature Capabilities

✔ Bulk Document Sending

✔ Reusable Templates

✔ Tracking & Reporting

How to get started with Zoho Sign

We’ve made life a little easier for you with this free trial. Every Zoho product starts with a free trial so you can see if you like it and go from there. If you have any questions, let us know!

Start Your Zoho Sign Free Trial

Why Zoho?

Zoho is one of the most affordable software developers for small-to-medium sized businesses, with comprehensive features across all of their applications for a price that doesn’t break the bank. You won’t find another software suite that has the integrations, the features, and the price points that Zoho has to offer, and the great thing is that their pricing is flexible so you can start small and scale up to enterprise level with ease.

We use most Zoho applications for our daily tasks, and they have helped to streamline our business processes and workflow immensely. They integrate well with Google Workspace, communicate data across the company to improve efficiency, and keep our company data secure at all times. If you’re looking for any of the above products, we recommend that you take a look at starting a free trial and have a go! We’re here to help answer any questions if you have them.

Why Ostratto?

Ostratto is a team of technical professionals that are here to assist you and your business on a truly personal basis. We have the skills and expertise to deliver comprehensive, cost-effective solutions, and will work to integrate Zoho software into your business in a way that meets all of your needs. We’re here to help you to find the most suitable products, and provide you with ongoing support throughout your time with us.

We've been partnered with Zoho for over five years, and have worked with their teams to develop their products for the UK market. We work with businesses from a wide range of sectors from leisure through to manufacturing. We are proud to be a part of all of our customers' businesses, integrating ourselves as trusted advisors and measuring our success on theirs. Wherever your organisation is right now, and wherever it wants to be in the future, we can help you to streamline your workflows and make your work less work with the right software solution.

4 old practices that won’t work after COVID

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 13:15:10 +0000

It’s not news that COVID-19 suddenly, unexpectedly, and dramatically turned the business world on its head. Business-as-usual changed all at once, without the benefit of robust planning we’re (hopefully) accustomed to in business. Those changes happened to keep employees safe while making sure work continued.

What’s also clear is that when the pandemic is under control and we find our “new normal,” it won’t look like what we had before. Businesses have adapted, employees have changed, and attitudes about working are different. We’ve found new ways to do business successfully, and in many areas, there’ll be no turning back.

Here are four old business practices that won’t work anymore post-COVID-19.

1. Employees working onsite only

Before COVID, the vast majority of businesses were uncomfortable with employees working remotely. In fact, 80% of US companies had no remote work program at all.

Employers pretty much suffered from inertia—after all, workers always came into the office to work. Without ever trying remote work, most leaders lacked the imagination to understand the potential of working from home. They worried that employees working away from the office wouldn’t be as productive. They claimed many jobs were “impossible to do remotely.”

Then COVID-19 came around, however, and jobs that were previously “impossible to do remotely” suddenly found their remote possibilities. What’s more, they achieved good results too. A study by Harvard Business School and New York University found that people who work remotely spend 48.5 more minutes per day than they did pre-virus. And this makes sense - when a long commute is off the table employees don't mind staying on to get jobs finished.

Other surveys found that:

44% of executives today feel employees have become more productive working remotely
41% of employees feel the same way

While many jobs require employees to work onsite, many others can support a remote workforce. Businesses will still need those work-from-home employees post-COVID-19, and they will be forced to continue supporting remote work.

2. Micromanaging as a management style

With many employees working remotely, management styles need to adjust. Monitoring employees that work in another location requires shifting your methods as well as your expectations.

It's not realistic to assume an employee is working based on how much time they spend at their desk. Even when you’re at the same location and can see an employee sitting across the room, you don’t know how productive they’re being.

Evaluate their performance, instead, based on the outcome. How is their work? Are they meeting their goals? What’s the quality of their work? These are the real measurements of productivity output that remote working highlights perfectly.

3. Using too many collaboration apps

It’s easy to see how it happened. CV-19 struck and companies quickly sent their employees home to safety. They hurriedly adopted remote work solutions for messaging, video, and calling—all the tools they needed to keep communication open so that work would continue to get done.

In rushing to choose new solutions, many businesses ended up with multiple overlapping apps. Having two or more apps that provide video calling, for instance, is not sustainable long term and can become confusing for the average user. App overload causes employee fatigue and wastes a significant amount of time.

Seventy percent of workers say having disparate work apps makes it challenging to get their work done. More than two-thirds report wasting up to an hour of work time per day just navigating between various apps. Sixty-eight percent of workers find themselves toggling between different apps up to 10 times in a single hour.

Too many apps can also mean running the risk of employees switching to other unauthorized tools that can pose a security risk. We've written about the risks of 'shadow IT' before.

Employees will only willingly utilise technology that’s easy to use, it’s more efficient to provide them with one platform they understand well and are comfortable with.

4. Keeping employees in the dark

It's key to remember that teams appreciate transparency, especially during uncertain times. They want to understand what’s going on with the business, management expectations, and their position. They want to be confident that the strong company culture they know isn’t changing.

No longer are employees in the office to hear news around the water cooler, chat casually with the boss, or celebrate wins in real time. But these are still valid communications needs, and employers must make sure they still happen in some form.

Communication and transparency are critical—even more so now with COVID-19.

Post-COVID tools to support remote work

When we (eventually) shift into a post-pandemic period, businesses will face a new work-life paradigm that looks nothing like before. From remote and hybrid work arrangements to new forms of communication, leaders will need to rethink those practices to stay competitive.

Having the right tools to support remote work will be one of the key differentiators. As work moves beyond the walls of the traditional office, employees everywhere will need technology that facilitates collaboration and drives teamwork. Tools like unified communications make collaboration effortless by combining team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform, allowing employees to choose how they want to collaborate and when.

By supporting tomorrow’s work-from-anywhere workplace—and shedding old, archaic practices that no longer make business sense—businesses will be ready to drive success far beyond the pandemic.

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Written in collaboration with RingCentral©.

Will we work from home forever?

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 21:09:15 +0000

In early March, Twitter and Facebook were among the first companies to close down offices and send staff to work from home—even before government agencies issued lockdown orders to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Fast-forward two months later, the two social media giants declared that most employees will at some point be able to telecommute permanently.

Large businesses have continued to extend their work-from-home policies. In many cases, they’re even making remote work a permanent fixture. Google, for example, initially told employees to work from home until June. Most recently, the search giant announced that workers could telecommute until July 2021.

It’s not just Silicon Valley tech companies. Most employees for investment banks like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are still working from home. Entertainment company ViacomCBS and music labels such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group have told workers to work remotely through the end of 2020.

Now that we’re about half a year into the remote work experiment, many employers have determined that the advantages of letting employees work from home may outweigh the negatives.

Herein lies the question: is remote work here to stay in the corporate world?

Most employees want to work from home

Studies show that 43% of those who previously commuted to work telecommuted during the height of the pandemic—and they enjoyed it. Remote workers say they are more productive and have better work-life balance since they don’t have a commute and can work flexibly. In fact, workers also report significantly higher levels of engagement when they work from home.

When the global health crisis is over, most employees still want the option to work from home at least part of the time. According to a survey by PwC, nearly three-quarters of employees (72%) said they’d like to telecommute at least twice a week after the pandemic is over, while nearly one-third (32%) want to work from home full time.

In a survey of 9,059 workers, 48% work from home during the pandemic and have a Workforce Happiness Index score of 75 out of 100, which is four points higher than employees who still have to go into their offices, according to a report by CNBC and SurveyMonkey. Remote workers are also more satisfied with their jobs: 57% of telecommuters say they are very satisfied versus 50% of non-remote workers who say they are very satisfied.

Companies want more remote work, too

As COVID-19 still lingers (and spikes), many are planning on making remote work permanent. In the short term, extending work from home keeps both employees and the company safe from safety-related events. In the long term, the flexibility of remote work promotes higher employee satisfaction and engagement, leading to significantly higher performance and retention. It's a win-win.

74% of CFOs surveyed by Gartner said at least some of their employees will be allowed to permanently work from home after the pandemic ends.

Not all workers can work from home

While remote work is something both leaders and employees want, it’s not an option to all workers. Only 37% of jobs can be done from home, according to University of Chicago economists.

For employees who can work remotely, 68% still want at some access to the office. Of those, 8% want to work full time in the office and 60% want to take a hybrid approach and be in the office a few times a week, according to PwC’s remote work survey.

The top reason people say they want to go into the office is to collaborate with other team members. Difficulty collaborating is a major reason people give for being unproductive while working from home (39%). They miss face-to-face interactions.

Others are simply more productive in the office because they have too many distractions at home. PwC found that 38% of remote workers feel balancing work with home duties, such as childcare, made them unproductive while working from home.

Coronavirus reshapes office working

When the health crisis is (finally) over, employees for some companies will return to their offices full time. Some will transition to 100% remote work. But most will likely take a hybrid approach, where employees work at home half the time and in the office half the time.

A permanent, flexible workweek has broad support among both executives and office workers, according to PwC’s latest remote work survey. While 83% of office employees want to work from home at least one day a week, more than half of employers (55%) anticipate that most of their workers will do so post-pandemic, the survey found.

For example, insurance company Nationwide is moving to a hybrid model. When the pandemic began, the company allowed 98% of its 27,000 employees to work from home and discovered that employee performance did not suffer.

As a result, Nationwide executives have announced plans to reduce 20 physical offices down to four main corporate offices, which will help the company save huge costs. Employees in the closed down locations will work from home permanently, while employees at the four remaining offices can split time between home and office, according to a magazine article.

Preparing for the remote future

Telecommuting has earned a permanent spot in the corporate world, and as we recover from the pandemic, more and more people will work from home in some way. That’s because not only is remote work better for safety purposes, but also fosters higher engagement and job satisfaction.

It’s also clear that many workers can’t work remotely. From restaurant staff to hardware engineers, many industries will return to normal after the pandemic. At least for now, most offices won’t go anywhere—but that can change in the near future.

Companies planning to expand remote work opportunities will need the right tools to maximize productivity amongst remote teams. While office workers can simply walk to a colleague’s desk to collaborate, remote teams don’t have the same convenience. It’s up to a company’s tools to facilitate communication and collaboration.

Unified communications solutions like RingCentral bundles team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform in the cloud, allowing employees to access all of their communications from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. Employees can easily switch from messaging to voice or video calls with a single click, keeping collaboration as effortless as possible to start.

Speak to Ostratto today to find out how we keep businesses connected and productive.

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Written in collaboration with RingCentral©.

5 Lessons We’ve Learned About Remote Work

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 10:16:21 +0000

If one was to capture 2020 in a single word, “unprecedented” would be a fairly solid pick. The rippling effects of the coronavirus pandemic have transformed all aspects of life, with how we work being one of the most salient.

Case in point: at the start of the year, 4.7 million Americans (3.4% of the working population) worked remotely. Just three months later, at the height of lockdown, 34% of Americans who previously went into the office every day were now working from home.

The Overnight Shift to WFH

This unprecedented shift is remarkable for its incredible pace, not so much the direction. Even before the pandemic accelerated the move from the office, remote work was on an upward trajectory with 159% growth since 2005. It’s estimated that by 2025, the majority of the workforce (at least 70%) will work remotely for at least one full business week each month.

At all levels of the corporate hierarchy, from admins up to CEO's, 2020 has represented a massive work-from-home experiment. As much of a rollercoaster as these last few months have been, the rapid shift to WFH offers a unique glimpse into the future of work, and to better prepare companies and their employees for life after the office.

The overnight shift to WFH marks the first time many employees have had to find ongoing and sustainable ways to work together while apart - and as a whole, teams are not doing too badly: according to a global survey of office employees during the pandemic, 68% said they’ve been “very successful” working from home. Employees are equally satisfied with their work activity performance at home compared to the office, and 70% of leaders say their teams are performing the same or better from home.

The Future of Remote Work

These positive assessments of remote work are quite remarkable given that workplaces were forced to transform themselves overnight and without much warning. Sentiments about working from home have likely improved as teams adapted to working remotely and refined the processes and tools by which they do so.

Given that remote work is here to stay, it’s worth looking at the experiences of the last few months to evaluate what we’ve learned about remote work so far as well as find ways to make remote work even better moving forward.

Without further ado, here are five lessons we’ve learned about remote work in 2020.

1. It can be hard for employees to disconnect

Fear that employees would slack off was once many managers’ primary objection to working from home. As it turns out, the opposite is true. Since the start of lockdowns, employees at home averaged 48.5 more minutes of work every day.

But that may not be the win it appears to be. Nearly half of workers also report feeling more burnt out. To combat this, businesses need to make it a priority to help employees maintain work-life balance, even when the lines between home and office are blurred.

2. Projects can easily get lost or buried

It’s easy to take for granted the built-in ways with which employees share information in office settings. An ability to quickly touch base in-person (on the way back from making a coffee) helped employees prioritise their projects and provided a unified sense of momentum. When everyone works separately, projects can all too easily become lost or buried.

The solution lies in increased visibility. To prevent key projects from falling off, all people involved need ways to easily access and share key documents and information, as well as project management and collaboration tools that make it easy to track progress.

3. Remote employee silos happen without communication

Whether within a team or across departments, silos occur when colleagues don’t communicate with each other about what they’re working on. And when the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, it can be costly for businesses.

Silos often result in duplicated work, blind spots, and other major business risks - and they’re more likely to occur when visibility is lacking, such as when everyone is working from home. Effective communication and collaboration, however, can help cure employee silos both formal (status meetings, progress reports) and informal (making it easy for workers to discuss work on the fly).

RingCentral offers a constant communication channel(s).

4. WFH improves many aspects of work but makes others harder

WFH does not have a universal effect on work - in fact, it improves some aspects of working while making others more of a challenge.

According to the Global Work from Home Experience Survey, homebound employees have a significantly easier time managing distractions and disruptions, and doing the sort of deep-thinking work that relies on this increased focus. But with fewer opportunities to interact organically, collaboration and a sense of connection drops off.

To get the most out of working from home, businesses need to find ways to continue to protect employees’ ability to work without distraction when it makes sense - but to also better enable seamless connectivity between workers and teams for tasks that require it.

5. It’s difficult (but possible) to recreate the organic collaboration that happens in the office

When it comes to teamwork when working from home, it’s not all bad news. Though remote work has been seen to fare worse than office environments when it comes to needs like getting timely information and collaborating with others, the results aren’t actually bad at all: six in 10 employees, a majority of workers, rate their ability to perform these activities from home positively.

This suggests that organic collaboration is possible when teams work remotely - but workers might need a little more help to do so. Setting up virtual “drop-in” office hours for managers, regular face-to-face team chats, and finding other ways to electronically recreate the easy communication that occurs in the workplace are key to fostering organic collaboration at home.

Communication and collaboration in the WFH era

What these lessons have in common is the theme of communication and collaboration. In a WFH world, the right tech becomes more than a communication tool - it’s the foundation upon which all work happens. This underscores the need for technology that’s accessible, seamless, and doesn’t create new challenges when it comes to helping employees connect with one another to get the job done.

A unified communications solution such as RingCentral helps to relieve many of the pain points employees encounter while they work from home. RingCentral combines team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform, allowing employees to choose how, where, and when they want to collaborate. By breaking down the barriers to workplace communications, remote teams can master collaboration regardless of where they work and take productivity to new heights.

Combine it with our other favourite product, G Suite, and enjoy your new super powers.

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Written in collaboration with RingCentral©.

Why you should Purchase G Suite from a Google Partner

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 18:01:16 +0000

These days, talk about digitalisation and ‘the cloud’ is constant and urgent. In our ever-globalising and ever-innovating world, the opportunities to harness cloud technology and use it to fuel growth are endless (just check out some of our previous blogs posts on cloud); but the idea of cloud technology in a business can also be daunting to manage.

Ostratto wants to help companies not only keep their heads above water during such a time of digitalisation, but unlock their maximum potential (and sail?). As a proud Google Cloud Partner and official reseller of Google Cloud services, we supply G Suite licenses at the same price as Google, but with additional services. Here are a few of the many reasons why taking advantage of a Google Partner can be a massive advantage for any business.

1. Same buck, more bang

By partnering with a Google Cloud Partner, you pay the same price for your licenses as you would buying directly from Google, but you get additional benefits, for free (yes free). The services are customisable for your business’s specific needs but they can include:

A security audit
A training workshop for your IT team
Implementation – existing business or new
User data migrations from existing systems
A combination package

Google Cloud Partners exist to act as a bridge between what can seem like a 'big scary Google' and a small business. We know our clients' businesses better than Google would ever be able to and that's a huge advantage for both the small business and Google. We identify the best support package that will not only improve how you utilise Google G Suite, but enhance all aspects of your business operations, keeping you efficient and ahead of your competition.

2. A friendly face

A businesses internal IT team may be able to blunder their way through a G Suite setup but what happens when things go wrong?

With a GCP Partner in your corner, the days of navigating the complexities of the cloud alone are over. In order to become a certified reseller, businesses must hold a rigorous set of prerequisites; these include passing a series of Google Cloud certifications and also having real-world proven experience with the products. To maintain our status we have to resit the certifications regularly and we're also expected to keep up-to-date with everything Google. When you partner with a qualified reseller like Ostratto, you really do gain access to years of experience with Google Cloud technologies and processes.

Having passed all the stringent prerequisites we then gain access to an advanced, prioritised level of support because it's expected we won't be asking the 'simple' questions. We can then use this level of support to get answers to the questions we haven't been asked before - all whilst the end customer only deals with one person whom they can trust to help.

Included in any basic resale of Google G Suite is a basic support package - perfect for the 'how do I do this' sorts of questions. Pair this with our support package and expect a truly empowered Google experience.

3. Put it on my tab please barman

One of the many benefits we offer to our clients is a single monthly bill. As we offer a range of various services and products we really focus on simplifying the recurring costs by billing one bill a month instead of a separate bill for each charge. It might seem a simple benefit but with the average medium-sized business spending $20,000 per month on SaaS tools, being able to consolidate multiple vendor bills into one predictable, itemised payment makes cashflow just a tad more manageable.

When you purchase GCP services through Ostratto, you can enjoy simple automatic card payments with pro-rata'd user costs automatically applied for you. You can then view your previous and current payments on our billing portal for your Google services along with any other services you receive from us. I can already see your billing department thanking you.

4. Value, maximised

Nobody likes to waste time or money. When businesses use the expertise of a GCP reselling partner like Ostratto, they can be confident that they’re getting the most value out of Google Cloud products. We help businesses identify and eliminate inefficiencies in their workloads, giving them more time to focus on using Google Cloud tech to drive direct value for their business.

There’s also no need to allocate extra time and staffing to train a new team member on the ins and outs of the cloud - most of your team have probably already used Google's services and anyway, that’s what we’re here for.

Passing comments

These are the most obvious reasons to purchase via a GCP partner like us but there are many more. If you’re interested in learning more about how Ostratto can make your cloud journey easier, we’d be happy to talk.

Related resources

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COVID-19: Remote-working Checklist

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Many if not most organisations have already crossed the 'working from home' bridge either successfully or terribly.

If you’re on an IT team, you’re probably used to preparing laptops for staff to use remotely, and setting up mobile phones with access to company data.

But global concerns over the current coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, and the need to keep at-risk staff away from the office, means that lots of companies may soon and suddenly end up with lots more staff working from home indefinitely. For a business that has already deployed a remote-working strategy, this process is probably pretty familiar. For the businesses that haven't, it can be a logistical, security and financial nightmare.

Even for businesses that are no stranger to remote-working it's still a very different situation. If you have colleagues who need to work from home specifically to stay away from the office, you can no longer use the tried-and-tested approach of getting them to come in once to collect their new laptop and phone, and to receive the on-site training that you hope will make them an effective teleworker. You may end up needing to set remote users up from scratch, entirely remotely, and that might be something you’ve not done a lot of in the past.

I can imagine you and your business are very busy so without further wait - here are our five tips for working from home effectively and safely.

1. Make sure your users have everything they need

It's without a doubt the most important. Not only does it ensure your users are happy (productive) remote-workers, it means they don't revert to finding their own uncontrolled or 'shadow' solutions to their problems (we will come to shadow solutions in a minute or so).

If users genuinely can’t do their job without access to server X or to system Y, then there’s no point in sending them off to work from home without access to X and Y.

Make sure you have got your chosen remote access solution working reliably first – force it on yourself! – before expecting your users to adopt it.

If there are any differences between what they might be used to and what they are going to get, explain the difference clearly and don’t leave them to find that out on their own. They’ll not only be annoyed, but will probably also try to make up their own tricks for bypassing the problem, such as asking colleagues to upload files to private accounts instead of using a storage system they thought they would have had access to remotely.

If you’re the user, try to be understanding if there are things you used to be able do in the office that you have to manage without at home.

This is an excellent opportunity to really evaluate what software you are using in your business and if there are a lot of business-critical tasks you aren't able to complete because you aren't in the office then I hate to break it to you - it's not 1996 anymore! It's 2020 and the cloud is here in a big way.

To see how cloud technology can empower your business today, check out our post on our favourite remote-working software.

2. Make sure you can see what your users are doing

Don’t just leave your users to their own devices (literally or figuratively).

If you’ve set up automatic updating for them, make sure you also have a way to check that it’s working, and be prepared to spend time online helping them fix things if they go wrong. If any of their systems or software has produced warnings or errors that you know they will have seen, make sure you review those warnings too, and let your users know what they mean and what you expect them to do about any issues that may arise.

Don’t patronise your users, because no one likes that; but don’t leave them to fend for themselves either – show them a bit of cybersecurity love and you are very likely to find that they repay it.

3. Make sure they have somewhere to report security issues

If you haven’t already, set up an easily remembered email address, such as security@yourcompany.com, where users can report security issues quickly and easily.

Remember that a lot of cyberattacks succeed because the crooks try over and over again until one user makes an innocent mistake – so if the first person to see a new threat has somewhere to report it where they know they won’t be judged or criticised (or, worse still, ignored), they’ll end up helping everyone else.

Teach your users – in fact, this goes for office-based staff as well as remote-workers – only to reach out to you for cybersecurity assistance by using the email address or phone number you gave them. (Consider snail-mailing them a card or a sticker with the details printed on it.)

If they never make contact using links or phone numbers supplied by email, they they are very much less likely to get scammed or phished.

4. Keep shadow IT out of the shadow

Shadow IT is where non-IT staff find their own ways of solving technical problems, for convenience or speed. If you have colleagues who are used to working together in the office, but who end up flung apart and unable to meet up, it’s quite likely that they might come up with their own ways of collaborating online – using tools they’ve never tried before.

Sometimes, you might even be happy for them to do this, if it’s a cheap and happy way of boosting team dynamics. For example, they might open an account with an online white-boarding service – perhaps even one you trust perfectly well – on their own payment card and plan to claim it back later.

The first risk everyone thinks about in cases like this is, “What if they make a security blunder or leak data they shouldn’t?”

But there’s another problem that lots of companies forget about, namely: what if, instead of being a security disaster, it’s a conspicuous success? A temporary solution put in place to deal with a public health issue might turn into an important part of the company’s online presence and so make sure you know whose credit card it’s charged to, and make sure you can get access to the account if the person who originally created it forgets the password, or cancels their card.

So-called “shadow IT” isn’t just a risk if it goes wrong – it can turn into a complicated liability if it goes right!

Closing comments

Most of all, if you and your users suddenly need to get into remote-working, be prepared to meet each other half way.

For example, if you’re the user, and your IT team suddenly insists that you start using a password manager and 2FA (those second-factor login codes you have to type in every time) then just say “Sure,” even if you hate 2FA and have avoided it in your personal life because you find it inconvenient.

Likewise if you’re the IT admin, don’t ignore your users, even if they ask questions you think they should know the answer to by now, or if they ask for something you’ve already said No to, because it might very well be that they’re asking because you didn’t explain clearly the first time, or because the feature they need really is important to doing their job properly.

We’re living in tricky times, so try not to let matters of public health cause the sort of friction that gets in the way of doing cybersecurity properly. And if you need assistance with any of this, join our partners in empowering their businesses with our intelligent solutions.

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Why We Love G Suite

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 21:00:28 +0000

We use (and provide) a multitude of different SaaS products here at Ostratto to keep everything running smoothly behind the scenes and to improve the productivity of the business. Although I have a lot of weird love for all of the services we use, my favourite and one I couldn't live without is G Suite.

Yes one could say we are albeit biased but I'm not afraid to come right out and say it’s by far the best all-in-one business services solution on the market right now. It's affordable, easy to use and super powerful.

Today we’ll dive into the unparalleled benefits of G Suite, why we use it and recommend it to all of our partners, and how it compares to other similar solutions on the market.

Contents

What is G Suite?

Gmail

Calendar

Drive

Docs, Sheets and Slides

Google Meet

Admin

Unparalleled Benefits of G Suite

Familiarity

Uptime

Affordability

Security

How to Move to G Suite

Let Ostratto do it for you

Other options

What is G Suite?

G Suite is Google’s suite of intelligent apps. This was formerly known as Google Apps, till it was re-branded in late 2016. We primarily recommend G Suite for clients that are needing email hosting for their business. However, G Suite is much more than just email. It also includes a variety of apps and features that can come in quite handy. In fact, you’re probably already using or are familiar with some of them.

G Suite has three different plans you can purchase - Basic, Business and Enterprise. We utilise the Business G Suite plan at Ostratto. This starts at just £9.20/user/month. For many of you, the basic plan is probably all you’ll ever need and that starts at £4.60/user/month. We have a much fuller breakdown of the individual G Suite system features on our product pages but here's a quick summary of our favourite features.

Gmail

According to a Litmus study, Gmail leads the way as the most popular email client, with a whopping 27.8% of the market share based on open rates. It’s no surprise as Gmail has been around since 2004 and now boasts over 1.2 billion users. One of the best things about G Suite is you basically get an enhanced ad-free version of the online email client you’re probably already using.

G Suite essentially allows your employees to have their own Gmail accounts with email addresses with your business domain name (example: tim@yourbusiness.co.uk). A very small business with one or two users might be able to get away with free Gmail accounts and some alias forwarding rules. But once you start hiring two or three employees, you’ll find yourself needing accounts that can be managed separately. It's the difference between looking like a new small business, or established and professional - we even wrote about it a couple blog posts back.

Calendar

I absolutely could not live without a calendar. Knowing when I have a client call or whether I have an important project milestone upcoming is totally essential. Google Calendar is a feature-packed calendar provided as part of G Suite and it will help you keep your schedule organised.

One of the great things about using Google Calendar in G Suite is the ability to create multiple calendars that are accessible to everyone in your business (or just a few users). For example, you might want a group calendar for events like team holidays and regular meetings. Having all your employees attached to the same business makes tasks like these even easier when compared to the free Google Calendar version.

One of the other cool features you get with Google Calendar once you go to the Business tier and upwards, is the ability to add conference calling features to an event. No messing around in separate products, you simply add video conferencing to the event and all attendees get an invite with join in details as well as a voice dial-in number if they aren't going to make the video call.

Google Drive

Drive allows you to allows you to store, access and share your files in one secure place. You then have easy access to them from any device. G Suite Basic plans come with 30GB of storage for every employee. G Suite’s Business and Enterprise editions provide unlimited storage so you will always have enough space for your files. We think that's pretty cool and I really have put it to the test with over 8TB and counting in a shared drive (we love movies what can I say).

If you haven’t used Google Drive before, one of the best things I like about it is the amazing search functionality. I mean it does make sense - Google do know a thing or two about search technology. No more rummaging around deep in folders, you can easily find what you’re looking for, no matter how disorganised you are.

Shared Drives are also very neat. You can create shared drives for projects, departments or teams so that it's easier to find that shared information with sharing multiple folders with each other. It also means that the classic business situation of a user leaving the company and nobody being able to access their shared important files. You can choose certain levels of access for team members - view, edit or manager roles provide set permission levels.

Docs, Sheets and Slides

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides pretty much speak for themselves. Fully fledged document processing, a spreadsheet tool and presentation suite all reside directly in the G Suite system without any software downloads needed. Should your internet connection not be available, you can still work offline and your changes are automatically synced when you connect back to the world.

Import documents to make them instantly editable, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PDF files (.docx, .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .txt, xlsx, .csv, .html, .ods). You can even collaborate and comment on Microsoft Office files without it having to automatically convert to Google’s format - great when you are working with Microsoft Office-based customers.

You can also export to common third-party formats which makes it easy to collaborate with other individuals or companies and send files back and forth, without ever needing to install or purchase additional software.

One of the best features of Google Work Suite is the real-time commenting and unlimited versions. Previous versions are kept indefinitely and they don’t count toward your storage. This makes it super easy to track changes made to a document or undo a mistake. Sharing documents with your coworkers or other individuals is also incredibly easy.

Google Meet

What better way to meet a new client instantly than jumping on a video call. Google Meet provides an easy and secure way to handle video calling without leaving your business system. All versions of G Suite, Basic, Business and Enterprise provide the product with 100, 150 and 250 participant limits respectively - generally way more than we have ever needed.

Participants can also share screen content, or when they are using Google Chrome, a single browser tab, which is pretty neat when you need to show somebody something. The Enterprise version also allows users to record their meetings to re-watch.

Calls are crisp, reliable and secure - our key desirables in any communication product ultimately.

Google Admin

The Admin console for G Suite is the like mission-control. It lets business owners easily manage everything from one single place. Do everything from adding new users and groups, configuring business apps, manage devices, configure security settings (like 2-factor authentication) and add new custom domains for your business which can be used for Gmail.

Now with the admin console being the admin console, only administrators can access the wealth of configuration available. Users can be provided different administrative levels via roles, so that only the relevant parts of the admin console can be access by users.

Unparalleled Benefits of G Suite

Although there are alternatives - Microsoft 365 and Zoho to name a few - there are some unparalleled benefits to G Suite which we are yet to see overcome. Here's a few.

Familiarity

One of the greatest benefits of going with G Suite for your business is that most of your employees are probably already used to using products like Gmail for email and Google Docs. This makes the transition much easier for your business and ensures you don’t have to waste time explaining to new hires how to utilise company tools; unlike Zoho or Office 365 where there might be more explanation needed.

G Suite also has the best compatibility on mobile devices compared to any other email provider. It works pretty much everywhere which certainly saves time troubleshooting with your users.

Uptime

When it comes to uptime, Google is one of the best when it comes to reliability. If you want to dig into the technical details, G Suite offers a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for covered services, and in recent years they’ve actually exceeded that. Also due to the fact that email is such an important part of every business, G Suite has no scheduled downtime or maintenance windows. All of their data centres are built with redundant infrastructure.

But just like any service, they can never be up 100% of the time. Therefore, you can always bookmark the G Suite status dashboard or follow us on our social platforms for updates on all of their products.

It's Extremely Affordable

There are other providers out there that are cheaper, such as Zoho, and don't get us wrong, Zoho offer a truly excellent service too. However, just as we often advise our partners - certain technical aspects of your business you should absolutely not cheap out on. Your business email is one of those areas. Having an email host that you can rely on can save you money down the road.

Here’s a look at G Suite’s pricing and what’s included in each plan - you can drill further down into this here, but here's a brief overview:

For everything that G Suite includes - this really is a steal.

G Suite is secure, really secure

When it comes to security, Google really don't play around. The product is built on some of the most secure infrastructure on earth. It’s trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world; such as HP, Verizon, Whirlpool, and Salesforce. As Google says, they are leading with a “security-first mindset.” They have industry-leading knowledge and expertise backing each and every one of their products, including G Suite. They have a very thorough white-paper which covers some of the measures they take which you can read here.

Some of their certifications:

How to Move to G Suite

If you have read up to this point and you are keen to get started with G Suite then that's awesome - you are making a good decision. Get ready to work smarter.

We are partnered with G Suite. This means we provide setup services for our clients using our wealth of knowledge on the product. We then offer support plans after the initial commission.

There are a few options of migration depending on where you are coming from and how technically versed you are.

Let Ostratto do it for you

The best way to move over to G Suite is to let us handle it for you. We have handled many migrations from various legacy systems with ease and we can help you today. Don't make the mistake of handling the migration yourself and losing years of important business data - it's simply not worth it.

For a quick quote or for more details on our migration and setup services just get in touch, I'm excited to chat with you and I'll try not to nerd out too hard.

Other Options

That being said, Google have provided extensive documentation on migration methods from various sources and if you are feeling technically confident then be sure to check out their guides:

In Closing

So there we are, a quick overview of why we go on about G Suite so much. Hopefully it's been of use to you and provided a half-decent run-through for you. If you have any questions about the product or if you want to get started today, just holla at us.

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4 Steps to Ensure Company-Wide Adoption of Communications Technology

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Considering our infatuation with technology, you’d think that we’d get excited when our organisations introduce new tools into our workflows. In many cases, however, that couldn’t be further from reality. During my time providing technical solutions to businesses I've come across many cases where individuals in the business had their own preferred project management app, often leading to a mismatch of processes and workflows and consequently, confusion. In response, management have migrated users onto a new project management app for the entire business, mandating that the team adopt the new app.

Several months later, users often slowly crawled back to their previous apps. Why? Because the users felt that the new solution didn’t meet their needs and had a convoluted user interface. The result was hundreds of collective hours and valuable budget wasted migrating between apps.

Control =/= Flexibility

Businesses deploy new technologies in response to business needs. However, deployment really is only half the battle. Users often resist technological change, which fragments teamwork as a result. Whether users are too busy to learn new processes or too stubborn to abandon old habits, their resistance can nullify any new technologies a business decides to introduce.

Migrating users to new technologies isn’t as straightforward as it seems too. Many companies demand that teams use certain tools and prohibit them from using alternatives. That creates a major problem if those tools are ineffective. A survey by ZenBusiness shows that 57% of employees feel working with inadequate and obsolete technology negatively affects workplace productivity and morale. Tasks take longer to complete, employees work longer hours, and the quality of work suffers.

And on the contrary, giving users too much freedom poses a challenge as well. Ineffective company-provided solutions often push employees to find and deploy their own solutions without approvals from security teams. A Forbes Insight survey found that one in five businesses experienced a cyber event due to shadow IT, or technologies that fall under the radar. This presents huge security risks for businesses.

When it comes to enterprise control versus business unit flexibility, who wins? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Deployment strategies include several key steps to ensure successful widespread adoption. Let's get going with four essential steps to help businesses get started.

1. Choose a communication solution with a seamless user experience

The most important factor in user adoption is the user experience. Millennials and 'Gen Zers' (who comes up with these?) grew up surrounded by communications technology (MSN, Skype, FaceTime) and expect the same level of simplicity in their professional tools. Without a seamless user experience, users will wander in search of better options.

Many businesses choose a multi-app approach, deploying a communications app for every need (messaging, video calling, phone, fax). The deluge of apps, however, often overwhelms employees. 68% of employees toggle between apps 10 times a single hour, with some toggling up to 15 times, according to a recent study. Toggling between apps destroys concentration, especially when switching apps requires you to enter meeting credentials and wait for long load times.

Communications technology should combine essential tools into a single platform. Unified communications solutions like the RingCentral or G Suite combine many communication methods into a single platform where employees can seamlessly switch between different modes of communication with a single click (or tap for our millennials). When compared to multiple apps, the simplicity of a single platform allows employees to work without being inundated by technology and that makes for a much better user experience.

2. Be transparent

The right messaging can make all the difference in user adoption. If employees feel obligated to adopt a new app to justify someone else’s decision, they’ll be much less inclined to make an effort. At the same time, choosing a new solution without consulting employees is a sure way to get mixed responses.

Businesses should start by assessing the team’s business needs. Employee surveys or leadership meetings help IT teams gauge how employees feel about the current ecosystem. With their concerns in mind, introduce the new communication solution explaining how it eases employee workloads and helps streamline workflows. Employees are much more receptive to technologies adopted with intent and will put more effort into making them work.

3. Provide training

Even tech-savvy users won’t entirely understand a new solution’s capabilities at the start. It's similar to how every so often you might discover a new feature on your phone after three years of using it! Without the full scope of what’s available, users might find the new solution lacking of obvious features and give up early.

Deployment plans should include training sessions before finalising any contracts. We would always encourage our partners to utilise our training services as part of any big software migration and generally IT leaders or service providers would offer training sessions using lesson plans customised to every individual department within a business.

Keep sessions bitesize and hands-on so users have a chance to test and ask questions. This keeps employees of all levels of technical expertise on the same page.

4. Engage with early adopters and empower ambassadors

Sometimes, employees resist new technologies because the benefits of switching their entire workflow aren’t clear. The same holds true for communications when migrating entire communication histories. Important files can get lost, and users don’t want to risk that.

Businesses should carefully choose their change leaders to educate employees. Leaders can host webinars and office-hour sessions, or simply answer questions from colleagues. By educating employees, businesses won’t leave employees to their own devices. Instead, they’ll take a proactive approach toward ensuring widespread adoption of their new communications solution.

Creating ambassadors of a new solution is absolutely key. By showing change leaders the benefits of a new system they are much more likely to encourage others to use the service too. This cuts down on direct training resources as well as leverages the confidence that teams have in their closest change leader or 'ambassador'.

Closing comments

Introducing new communication solutions within your business can certainly present challenges, but with the right approach it will be successful. Todays IT users have high expectations for their workplace technology and so IT leaders ultimately need to keep users interested, invested, and educated in the deployment strategy. With employees fully on board, businesses can successfully deploy the new solution and start streamlining communication and collaboration.

An effective communications solution has to meet the needs of as many users as possible to ensure business-wide adoption. Luckily, unified platforms solutions such as RingCentral and G Suite, check all the boxes. All of the products we provide integrate seamlessly together to provide a one-stop shop for business users, minimising app switch and consequently maximising productivity.

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