Business Solutions for Fall 2020

6 F A L L 2 0 2 0 What Employees Need to Effectively Work from Home In light of the social distancing required to reduce the spread of COVID-19, your employees may now be working from home. Consider these strategies to help them improve focus and productivity: • Encourage a designated work- space. Your employees will likely work better from a desk or table in a separate area rather than from the living room sofa. Not only does a designated workspace provide a quieter environment, it also helps communicate to family members that the work day is in progress. • Offer options for communication and collaboration. Email alone is insufficient. Remote workers benefit from using a “richer” technology, such as video conferencing, that gives participants many of the visual cues of a face-to-face meeting. Such technology also helps to maintain morale during this challenging period of isolation. • Provide the broadband and phone services your employees need. The services your employees currently have installed at home may work for family use but be inadequate for the increased demands of business applications. Madison Communica- tions offers high-speed fiber internet along with Unified Communications call features included in our Hosted PBX service. For help equipping your remote workers for success, call Madison Communications at 800-422-4848. C loud computing is thrown around a lot as an umbrella term and is often confused with hosted services such as hosted virtual desktops and hosted virtual servers. They’re separate technologies, but they can work well together. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the essential characteristics of cloud computing include: • On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider. • Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations. • Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to demand. Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth. • Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability appropriate to the type of service (such as storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service. With hosted services, the hosting provider takes care of all the server-related issues. The business not only rents the hardware from the host, but also pays the host to manage it. Hosted services enable businesses to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Hosted ser- vices could include hosted virtual desktops, hosted virtual servers, hosted exchange email, online backup and disaster recovery, and hosted VoIP. Hosted services are often combined with cloud services. Marrying virtual desktops and the cloud, for example, provides flexibility. For the business, it makes moving locations, adding new offices, or adding new employees much easier. Plus, IT resources aren’t tied to a specific location and services can be delivered to any device. Another benefit is built-in business continuity. Since the IT resources are not located at a company location, any disaster or disruptive event at the company doesn’t stop the business from operating. The shifting of non-critical IT functions to an outside provider also frees up internal resources to focus on the organization’s core business. Cloud Computing vs Hosted Services