Digitization and climate change are both hot topics. The two subjects are also getting used together in the same sentence more frequently. For example, did you know digitization is good for reducing carbon emissions? According to the World Economic Forum, Digital technologies have the potential to reduce global emissions by 15%.
Since the pandemic lockdown, people have been working from home. The workforce has been slow in returning to the corporate office setting. An IFS survey conducted last year reports that almost three-quarters of respondents plan to increase spending on digital transformation. The climate control benefits include a reduction of CO2 emissions due to less commuting and travel to in-person meetings. Technologies like Microsoft Teams have made multi-site team meetings easy and readily available.
Cloud migration is the price of admission to competing in the digital world.
Moving your IT environment to the cloud reduces the need for additional hardware, but more importantly, to your bottom line and the environment, cloud migration modernizes your operations. While being on the cloud, and using robust cloud-enabled services like IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces, won’t make your business carbon neutral, it is a significant first step on that journey.
DEMATERIALIZATION
How You Can Reduce the Environmental Impact on Doing Business
Hardware casings, cords, adaptors, and other electrical products are called E-waste. E-waste is a growing problem. Significant environmental damage happens because nature cannot absorb these products. E-Waste is a significant contributor to the haphazard disposal of old electronics: they’re inert. All E-Waste products contain hazardous materials of one kind or another. The toxic materials are predominantly lead and mercury.
By switching to IronOrbit’s cloud, you can reduce the amount of hardware because you no longer need to invest in so many on-site computer stations. There’s no need to pay for its maintenance or replace machinery when it becomes obsolete. Instead, you only pay for the exact services you need. Over time, this saves you money. Cloud computing can help your company become sustainable while making it more profitable and productive.
Reducing Needless Travel Reduces Carbon Emissions
INFINITY Workspaces is our brand of DaaS, robust technology that enables employees to work remotely with ease. There are different INFINITY packages to fit specific use cases. Even designers and engineers can access the most demanding modern applications on their mobile devices. INFINITY Workspaces empowers Geographically dispersed teams to do their best work. The technology inspires productivity while eliminating the need for lengthy commutes. It also eliminates the carbon emissions associated with daily commutes.
Adopting a work-from-home environment or even a hybrid workplace is an excellent way to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. You could also save some money in the process.
Shared Data Centers Reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)
On-premises servers and data centers use substantial amounts of energy both for running and cooling. The manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of the hardware and peripheral products also add to GHG emissions. Companies can reduce emissions considerably by moving to a cloud computing environment. Once a company moves to the cloud, they use shared data centers. Like the ones operated by IronOrbit, shared data centers run far more efficiently than individual facilities or on-premises servers. There is no longer a need for personal equipment.
A recent forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that cloud computing will prevent the emission of more than one billion metric tons of CO2 between 2021 and 2024. Moving away from legacy software and hardware and towards cloud adoption is a logical next step for companies. Insofar as business continuity and investment in the future, cloud migration is a necessity.
Cloud computing and all the digital benefits of having your IT infrastructure on the cloud are valuable for IT departments. IT departments can work more closely with business leaders to develop new sustainability goals. It is favorable for companies, and of course, it contributes to a healthier environment.
Contact us for a no-obligation proof of concept. We’re here to help.
What Happens When You Need to Scale Your Business?
If you want to scale up your peanut butter factory, you get a bigger building, bigger hoppers, giant dehulling, and processing machines. It takes months, maybe years. But what if you’re not in the peanut butter business?
What if you run an architectural firm, a company in the travel industry, or even an up-and-coming animation or gaming business?Well, you don’t need the peanut processing machines, but you’re going to need serious computing capability. To get that computing capacity, you’ve got two choices.
Choice #1 – You can invest months and significant capital in on-site servers and workstations. Time will drag on while you get an IT professional to design the system, order the servers, install the servers, set up the applications, etc.
Even if you’re willing to put big bucks into on-site infrastructure, you won’t.
Why?
Because 2022 is all about flexibility.
Everything from 2019 to today has demonstrated that the companies that can scale up and down with the most speed and agility win the race.
The big deals aren’t going to wait for you to get your on-site IT systems up to speed, and you’ll miss out.
So, let’s talk about the better option.
Choice #2 – DaaS or Desktop as a Service
What is Desktop as a Service (DaaS)?
DaaS is a cloud-based workflow solution that gives you access to a virtual desktop in the cloud with your applications, operating system, and personal settings all in place. You can access your virtual desktop securely from any internet-connected device, regardless of location. Because all the computing power is in the cloud, virtual desktops can be set up or “deployed” for new employees within minutes compared to days and weeks with traditional, on-site infrastructure. Scaling back is just as efficient and straightforward.
But wait, not all DaaS solutions are the right fit for your company. Some offer more control and flexibility than others. Some virtual desktops demonstrate much better responses when using demanding graphic applications.
These clients need reliable access to intensive graphics resources worldwide, and performance matters. Check out IronOrbit’s DaaS solution called INFINITY Workspaces.
So, let’s get back to the question.
How Does DaaS Help Your Company Scale Up Faster?
1. Employees Can Use Their Favorite Device – BYOD
Because DaaS provides all the computing power within the cloud (including all the applications, databases, etc., that your employee needs to get work done), an employee can use whatever computer they have and like. How does that help you? Well, you don’t have to source, buy, and provide high-end desktops and laptops. Sure, if you want to buy your employees’ laptops, that’s great, but if you’re going to get things up and running quickly, BYOD will work as a temporary stop-gap measure as you scale up and wait for your laptop order to arrive.
2. Expand Within the Cloud
The cloud is the clear winner compared to sourcing, buying, installing, and setting up in-house servers. Because cloud solutions like those offered through IronOrbit are nearly infinitely expandable, you never have to wonder whether your infrastructure has the capacity to handle the next pro-growth project you need to tackle.
3. Scale Without Huge Up-Front Investment
Perhaps the most attractive feature of DaaS solutions is that you only pay for what you need, and you don’t have to spend money to buy infrastructure up-front. Monthly subscription payments make paying for usage only easy. Scaling up is simplified when you don’t have to develop CapEx funds to get it rolling.
4. Scale Up Without Cybersecurity Worries
One of the challenges of scaling up with on-site infrastructure is the security component. It takes time and a team of cybersecurity professionals to deliver 24/7/365 protection. In stark contrast, the IronOrbit private cloud has world-class security. That high level of security is a protective umbrella that keeps your data safe while you ramp up operations quickly.
5. Even if You Have Existing On-Site IT Infrastructure – Hybrid Scaling
Companies that have invested in on-site infrastructure sometimes get tunnel vision for scaling, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or question. You don’t have to choose either the cloud or your on-site setup. If you have existing on-site IT infrastructure and need to scale up a specific business area or need extra capacity, DaaS is your best friend. Employees can use their virtual desktops across the company network and leverage cloud computing power, thus diminishing the load on your on-site infrastructure.
6. Get New and Remote Employees Up and Running Quickly
For the reasons mentioned above – cloud use and BYOD – DaaS is the perfect solution for efficiently computing resources for new employees.
Whether your employees are all in the office or scattered worldwide, you can provide them with access to their virtual desktop and all the company resources they need to do their job. DaaS deployment for new employees is lightning fast compared to traditional, on-site infrastructure and computers.
7. Streamlined, Remote Management, and Configuration
Updates, upgrades, configurations, and compliance adherence protocols can be pushed out to all your employees’ virtual desktops quickly and easily, helping you move the entire company along without the usual hassle and slowdowns associated with IT maintenance.
Wrapping it All Up
Let’s talk about your company for a minute. If scaling means hiring more people and giving them the IT resources necessary to handle more work and bigger deals, then DaaS is worth your serious consideration.
It’s the best way to scale up your IT resources without wasting time, money, and opportunity.
Call us for a free consultation at (888) 753-5060.
Scalability has always been an essential characteristic for companies to develop. Today, an organization’s capacity to scale quickly, effectively, and economically can mean the difference between winning new business or missing it altogether. At the rate business moves in 2022, the window of opportunity opens and closes quickly. Being prepared is essential.
An increase in scalability enables businesses to grow their capacity and capabilities effectively and with minimal disruption. The benefits of increased scalability extend beyond handling more business. The foundations required for modern scalability also deliver immense value in other areas, including:
· Enhanced & Improved Customer Experience
· Improved Resiliency
· Nimble Operations
· Highly Engaged & Motivated Employees
Scaling is complex and involves many moving parts ranging from building the right corporate culture to hiring high-performing talent, having the proper structure, and the financing to support it. Using the right technology is an essential ingredient, and that’s where this article will focus.
Everyone Benefits When People and Tech Work Together
Any discussion about technology and modern scalability involves leadership because leadership needs to communicate closely with internal IT and external technology partners. A technology engaged leadership is the only way an organization can prepare its people and culture to handle the growth. Improving scalability in the modern sense means a paradigm shift in how the company operates. The intention and drive to become a better company, to escalate its level of service to its customers, has got to be part of the equation, or attempt at scaling to any significant level will fly off the rails.
Complacent leadership or a culture of doing business-as-usual is one of the reasons companies procrastinate investing in upgrading their technology infrastructure. If current equipment is working, why mess with it?
A recent McKinsey report shows a slight improvement in companies trying between 2018 and 2020. This chart indicates while most companies have made progress modernizing their operations, less than one-third have moved beyond the pilot phase.
Legacy Systems Are More Susceptible to Cyber Attacks
This kind of reliance on legacy equipment not only hobbles any attempts at scaling, old hardware, and outdated operating systems are a disaster waiting to happen. Legacy systems are a significant cybersecurity risk.
Our articleWHY IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SO IMPORTANT TO SUSTAINED SUCCESS (PART 1)? Explains the importance of having people with good communication skills leading technology, data, and processes. It would be best if you had good communicators knowledgeable about available technologies and how they can help. These consultants can help you rethink your operations from the top down. The right partner can also maintain and refresh technology roadmaps to ensure a consistent unified architecture (referred to as an “operational backbone” in the article mentioned above).
IronOrbit is the kind of partner who has the business operations experience and technical expertise to get your next-generation operating model started on solid footage..
Increasing scalability is a challenge for any company on multiple levels, but significant changes can become seamless with the right technology in place, at least from an IT perspective.
Talk to one of our consultants today. We can help get the conversation started and help you evaluate the best available options that are right for your business.
Scaling up is the ability to take on increased workloads in a cost-effective manner and meet the demands of your business without suffering the negative consequences of overreaching.
Scaling up sounds like a fantastic idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to handle more work, delivering more goods and services while leveraging economies of scale for greater profitability?
But the promise of scaling is often like an iceberg. What you see above the water (the work to be done) is nothing compared to the work lurking under the water. These are the challenges faced in scaling a business. Some companies get to a point where it is painful to add another client or bring on more talent. Scaling up seems like piling on more overhead for less reward. Revenue never has a chance to turn into profits.
Here are some barriers many companies may face as they ramp up their operations.
Scaling Up Too Soon
A good question to ask a good business consultant is, Is it too soon to grow the business? Any time before you have all the pieces in place and a strategy to scale is too soon. Is the market is ready to embrace and demand your products or services? Timing is everything. First, to go big into the market is sometimes a good idea, but sometimes not. Companies get eaten alive and never recover.
No Plan to Scale Up
Often the small to mid-size business fails in the efforts to scale for lack of planning. They have an objective and a vague notion of how to get there. Growth-minded companies might partner with that vendor or hire new employees. But all too often, a structured plan is missing. Having a strategy that guides the requirements, stages, and timeline for scaling is foundational for success. As a result, the timing is off, and the company is missing pieces of the puzzle. Frustration and failure soon follow.
No Understanding of the Difference Between Growth and Scaling
For most successful companies, growth came before scaling up. Taking time to grow allows SOPs to be established and perfected. Taking the time to grow enables hiring key people and building a solid reputation. These things are critical for financial backing to scale. Growth is a time to experiment and approve or discard strategic partners and vendors. Growth helps them understand the management and IT resources required for successful scaling. Multiplying processes and output without a substantial increase in resources is the foundation of scalability. Business leaders need to know if the company is prepared to scale up.
Unnecessary or Untimely Product/Service Additions
As soon as a company begins to have a little bit of success in their efforts to scale, they often become overzealous with their efforts to take over the marketplace.
They may move away from their core business too quickly and begin advertising products and services they are not prepared to deliver. Even if they can make a dollar on those tangential goods and services, they are taking resources away from what is central to their current revenue stream and their ability to scale.
Selecting the Wrong Partners & Vendors
Companies across the planet have learned the wrong partners or vendors can put companies at risk. Long supply chains and unproven vendors can have detrimental consequences on the delivery of goods and services to your customers, as well as injure brand reputations.
Avoid vendors and strategic partners who over promise and under deliver. There is no room for freeloading. Everyone has to do their part.
Lack of Internal Communication
Employees need to know the company culture and what is expected. Companies need complete buy-in from their workforce to scale up successfully. There also must be a strategy communicated internally. Along with the nuts and bolts of your well-laid strategy is a minefield of employee concerns, expectations, and emotions that you must address. If employees feel left out of the loop – or worse, insecure in their jobs – they will not be best positioned to support scaling efforts. Internal communication requires more than just a company-wide meeting or a series of internal memos sent out to senior staff. Instead, the business leaders must keep their finger on the pulse of how the staff is acclimating to the proposed and in-progress changes.
Verne Harnish’s book Scaling Upshows how to improve scalability. Scalability requires putting the right team together and then educating them on the growth strategies of the company. Articulate a clear vision for meeting future goals regularly.
The last decision Steve Jobs made was to build Apple University.
He knew that it would be the one legacy he’d leave behind so that his organization would thrive long after he was gone.
Cutting Prices
Once you’ve been able to leverage some economies of scale, there is often a temptation to cut prices to undercut the competition and gain more market share. “After all,” you think, “We’re still making the same amount on our goods/services.” While it’s tempting to cut your prices and try to push the competition out of business, the money you will lose is better saved and utilized within your scaling efforts.
Technology That Can’t (or Can’t Easily) Scale-Up
Whether you’re working with legacy systems that keep your productivity limited, or you’re working with on-site workstations and servers that are expensive and cumbersome to scale, your technology is limiting your potential. This roadblock used to be a nearly insurmountable one for businesses trying to scale on a budget. However, with advances in cloud-based IT infrastructure and Desktop as a Service, the financial hurdle considerations are lowered due to the cloud’s ability to scale with your business expansion. Companies across the planet have factored cloud computing ability into their scaling strategy and are successfully leveraging the flexibility, mobility, and cost-effective nature of cloud workflow assets.
As an IBM fellow, Jason McGee puts it, migrating applications to the cloud can deliver significant business benefits for companies of all sizes.
Failing to Create Long-Term Demand
Business leaders that fundamentally misunderstand the role of advertising and marketing often pin their hopes of scaling on the stop-and-go stutter-step of marketing efforts. While marketing strategy should always be a part of your scaling endeavor, it is not sufficient on its own to supply continuous, qualified customers. Instead, part of any scaling strategy should be a plan to grow market demand for your products/services. After all, you want them knocking on your door for what you provide; you don’t want to be chasing work constantly with ad campaigns.
Cash Flow and Credit
There is no way around it, scaling requires sufficient cash flow. Many organizations with a fantastic plan to scale launch that endeavor, only to find that their efforts are stymied by lack of on-hand cash or credit. In a recent episode of “What’s Up AEC?!” the Immediate Past Board Chair of ACEC National, Charles Gozdziewski warns about the cash flow aspect of scaling up too quickly. “I’ve seen small firms suddenly become part of a big project. They go from 10 people to 25 people and then they go bankrupt. They just don’t have the financing or financial knowledge to handle it.”
Each stage of your scaling strategy will require more financial backing, and that backing must be available at that stage or things begin to unravel. Setting yourself up for success requires ensuring that you will have the backing you need well in advance of your step to the next level of operational expansion.
Scaling up starts and ends with individuals. Make sure you have the right people in the right seats.
Quality Employees Instead of Quantity
Scaling starts and ends with individuals. Whether you are in a service industry or manufacture goods, your employees can make or break your scaling prospects. As much as anything else, scaling requires the right beliefs and behavior. Growth-oriented companies need people who are comfortable with change, who can move fast, and take ownership of tasks. In the rush to scale, companies often hire too quickly and find that they experience internal roadblocks to productivity because of the unqualified staff they’ve hired. Unfortunately, companies that are quickly ramping up delivery of goods and services often don’t have time for extensive employee training or the flexibility for employees to learn “on the job.” A resourceful HR team should be among your first hires to help ensure that your business sources and hires employees that can step in and do the work without handholding.
Ignoring Growth Pains and Fixating on Growth Pains
Whether leadership is determined not to let that “one issue” hold things back or fixate on that “one issue” to the detriment of other things that require attention, it still lands the administration in a difficult spot. On the one hand, small issues at one stage of scaling can become mountains of pain in the next stage of expansion. On the other, a fixation with a specific issue can lead to an unhealthy overemphasis on one aspect of the business, throwing everything out of kilter.
To scale, you must be aware of growing pains and be able to handle them appropriately without devoting all your attention and resources to those problems.
Micromanagement
Organizations with micromanagers at the top very often do not do well when it comes to scaling up operations. Delegating responsibility is an essential component of scaling an enterprise. A business leader must know their self well enough to see this tendency in themselves before it becomes an issue that derails the scaling process. Sometimes, it’s necessary to step into a different leadership role and allow someone that has delegation skills to fill that administrative slot. As you scale, so should your management structure. Finding the right role for you to play and bringing in the people you need to bolster your weaknesses is a sign of a good leader.
In Conclusion
Despite significant roadblocks to developing capacities to scale up quickly, there are multiple benefits for an organization to prepare itself for the likelihood of scaling up.
The challenges of scaling up are complex because scalability isn’t just about growth. It also has to do with its ability to be flexible, agile, and versatile. The same things that position the business for expansion are the same things that prepare them for unknown shifts in the market and unforeseen events like a worldwide pandemic. Preparedness is all about becoming proactive and being strategic with digital technology.
In a Forbes article from March 1, 2021, Paolo Gallo and Giuseppe Stigliano write, “Because of the dizzying speed of change today, fueled by this umpteenth acceleration, companies can’t count on their strengths alone to innovate. The CEO of a mobility services company reminded us how crucial it is at this stage to build eco-systems, resisting the temptation to reduce them to ego-systems. We have to collaborate with third parties to build systems in which the individual parts function as a single entity, in a more or less continual way to provide high-value-added services to final customers. Companies have to see themselves as fluid platforms, capable together of providing a value proposition that is exponentially bigger than what they could offer alone.”
In one of our previous blogs, we stressed the importance of componentization as a key ingredient to offering new digital value propositions. Taking the time to componentize offerings and build a solid digital foundation for your company will also position it for agility, flexibility, and growth.
The in-depth Deloitte Insights article, Putting Digital at the Heart of Strategy, goes beyond pointing out that digital transformation enables new growth opportunities. It indicates that those companies that don’t digitize in the next five years will be doomed.
Digitizing operations, a key benefit of cloud computing, improves an organization’s ability to meet sudden increases (or decreases) in demand.
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