Without The Cloud, working from home would be near on impossible. Let’s think back just a few years; something as easy as accessing the information you needed right there and then was enough to give you a pounding headache!
Let me explain:
Step one: you needed to “sign-in to your work network”. Sounds easy right? It really wasn’t.
I lost count of just how long I spent with my company’s “IT Support” instead of getting on with those urgent tasks at hand!
Step 2: you’re in the network, but the file your colleague was supposed to complete makes no sense at all. Great! More delays. You probably found yourself having to wait until the next day, for you to be in the office to discuss the document in detail.
By then, something that should have taken an hour to complete is now a day late!
The Cloud changed everything
Still not sure what “The Cloud” is? Let me try to explain.
The Cloud is where you store information. Storage is provided to you by hosting company’s servers that you can access from anywhere, as long as you have web accessibility. This made working from home possible.
Many businesses have been quite anti Remote working. They preferred to store data on servers in their offices and dismissed Remote working as a taboo subject. You often heard phrases such as “only those that don’t want to work do that!”
Believe it or not, Cloud storage is believed to have started back in the 1960s by a chap named Joseph Carl Robert Lickliter. Imagine your parents “working from home”! And imagine how different the world would be now!
Thankfully, companies such as Zoho, Microsoft, QuickBooks, and Google (to name just a few) worked hard to convince us that storing our data with them was safe. Legislation such as GDPR also helped to steer this in the right direction.
28% of the workforce have adopted Remote working
Just before this crisis, the ONS and Guardian reported that only around 5% of the workforce worked from home for the period Jan-Dec 2019. As of the 19th May 2020, the ONS estimated that figure to have increased to 28%.
If companies like Microsoft and Google hadn’t slowly moved the workforce to the cloud over the last few years, I genuinely believe the world economy would be a lot worse off than it is now.
IT teams may not have had time to set all users up for Remote working, connecting remotely to their servers. As a result, many businesses would have ground to a halt.
Simpson Dean believes that an Remote working ‘revolution’ is taking place, and this shift can only be for the better. Over the next article releases, we will be focusing on why we believe this and what tools are instrumental in making this happen.
So sign up to our mailing list to find out how we are making Remote working work for us.
