Take Control of the Cloud

Fortunately, one of the newest developments in IT, cloud-based computing, gives business and IT decision makers a considerable measure of control. With proper resource investments and infrastructure development, you can capitalize on the cloud and get back in the driver's seat of your business.

Mission to empower employees with his trust

With a mission to empower employees with his trust and give them opportunities to increase productivity, Sinclair decided against a brick-and-mortar location at the inception of the company and deployed an entirely remote workforce. Through off-site technologies like VoIP and those that facilitate collaboration and document storage, OnSite has achieved greater efficiencies and maintained a positive, virtual environment for its employees. As a result, Sinclair has seen his business annually save an estimated $1 million in overhead, truly turning his employees into genuine "income generators."

Thanks to the cloud, companies like OnSite need not wrestle with issues like software upgrades and maintenance, server proliferation and document version control. OnSite's story demonstrates that a company can control its own business cloud to better manage applications and users, all while enabling its employees to be more productive.

Businesses must adopt a customized, relevant approach to the cloud; no single, uniform approach will end in success. Fortunately, you can innovate rapidly within a customized infrastructure, blending software with cloud-based services to get the best of both worlds. In the end, you may have more ownership and control over how your company utilizes the cloud than you realized.

Highly customizable, the cloud gives businesses the ability to retain and also extend on-site software. For instance, if an application requires extensive customization to meet the company's needs, managing that software in-house remains possible. In other instances, IT can combine off-site services with on-site software to gain a high level of flexibility and access. For example, a company with a customer-relationship management (CRM) solution in-house may maintain its own database, but sales and marketing personnel in the field may access it at a customer site online.