The Cloud: Business Continuity as a Service

Businesses Are Preparing For Another Shutdown. Are You?

Many companies—like Atlassian, Dropbox, Facebook—decided last year to let their staff WFH (work from home) permanently. Others have announced their plans to offer flexible scheduling, or hybrid office models, or are simply leaving the decision up to the worker.

Needless to say: Remote work is going well for these companies.

And since they already have the technology and policies to securely work anywhere, another forced office shutdown won’t cause a major disruption for them.

They already have a home office setup. Everyone is trained on how to access company files and resources from home.

Other types of businesses, however, aren’t as ready to commit to a WFH policy or a remote access solution. These companies have a much tougher road ahead.

In this post, we address why remote access solutions are year-round, permanent employee enablement tools—and not just a response to forced shutdowns.

What Is a Remote Access Solution?

A remote access solution provides employees safe, continuous, secure access to their company’s resources from anywhere.

The types of remote access solutions that Right Networks offers include:

• QuickBooks Hosting
• Tax Application Hosting
• Firm IT Outsourcing

These offers all include remote access benefits such as bank-level security, cyber threat monitoring, easier remote collaboration, 24/7 support, regular backups and much more.

QuickBooks Hosting and Tax Application Hosting turn regular accounting software and tax applications into cloud accounting software and cloud tax applications. You maintain the same workflows that you’re used to, with the added bonus(es) of secure remote access.

Firm IT Outsourcing—better known around here as Right Networks Cloud Premier—provides cloud accounting software and cloud tax applications PLUS managed IT. It’s best for accounting, tax and CPA firms with 10+ employees (though the employee count isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as Cloud Premier offers immense benefits to firms of any size.)

Why Is a Remote Access Solution Important?

Put aside your work location preference for a moment and step back in time to March 2020.

1. (Almost) everyone hectically moved from in-office to home office
2. Hackers started taking advantage of home internet networks (which led to a record-breaking increase in cyber attacks)
3. Employees depended heavily on IT personnel for troubleshooting home office equipment (even though IT personnel weren’t familiar with it)

No one was prepared for the “starting tomorrow, work from home” mandate … except for those with a remote access solution already in place.

But if business continuity isn’t enough, here are several reasons why a holistic remote access solution (like cloud accounting software) is important:

1. Secure access to all resources (apps, software, files, client tools) from anywhere
2. Cloud network activity is monitored 100% of the time (i.e. sketchy behavior will be reported)
3. Work is saved automatically and backed up regularly
4. No energy-sucking servers to maintain
5. No easily stolen physical back-ups
6. Tech support resources for you (and for clients also using the same cloud accounting software)

Cloud Accounting Software Prepared Businesses for WFH

Yes, we just did wrote a whole bunch about why remote access is critical year-round, with or without a pandemic, but the fact is:

With school starting soon and COVID cases again on the rise, another quarantine could be on the horizon.

Your time to decide if your business needs remote access policies, cloud technology, networking equipment, etc., is over.

The only way to prepare is by answering this question: If a stay-at-home order was announced tonight, would you be able to work tomorrow?

For those who answered “maybe” or “no,” here are some steps to help get your business prepared:

• Select a cloud hosting provider best fit to support your business
• Create or modify your remote work policy
• Train employees about securely connecting to work resources from home (pro tip: ask your cloud hosting provider to provide this training during onboarding)
• Prepare IT helpdesk staff with resources to help them troubleshoot common remote access questions

Right Networks Cloud: Business Continuity as a Service

Regardless if offices are shut down or not, getting a remote access solution in place has become critical.

Learn more about cloud hosting technology here, or contact one of our great sales representatives to get your questions answered.

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