Today’s modern workplace is being transformed by various factors including new technological- and business trends such as cloud computing, machine learning, AI and BYOD as well as changing employee expectations. Companies now work with more diverse and globally distributed teams, partners, and suppliers, while selling as well as marketing their offerings to customers around the world and contending with an ever-evolving, and increasingly complex threat landscape.
To survive in this new business landscape organisations need to empower employees to get work done from anywhere on any device. Solutions are required to protect company data across devices with always-on security and technology management needs to be simplified in order to help IT focus less on administration or maintenance and more on enabling staff to be more productive through novel tools.
Microsoft 365 has been specifically developed to help companies of all sizes and within all sectors thrive in this new operating environment by combining Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security into a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. It also enables diverse and dispersed teams to effectively communicate and collaborate through the broadest and deepest set of apps and services with a universal toolkit for teamwork, giving people flexibility and choice in how they connect and share.
Simultaneously, Microsoft 365 includes tools and solutions to help businesses safeguard customer data, company data and intellectual property with built-in, intelligent, and always-on security built for the mobile-first-cloud-first world.
Beyond the applications and solutions that are enabling digital transformation, enterprises and SMEs are also increasingly turning to the cloud to achieve essential flexibility and efficiency, rather than focusing on their own on premise server platform.
However, for a lot of organisations within many industries such as banking, financial services and healthcare, on-premises operations aren’t going away anytime soon—if at all—so optimising existing technology assets and investments in a hybrid cloud setup enables them to have the flexibility to choose the best location for each application by moving workloads to the cloud on demand. Microsoft Azure enables companies to choose their suitable balance between on-premises, public, and private cloud that best meets their unique security, compliance, and operational requirements.
“Within every industrial era, the most successful companies have capitalised on the technology trends of the day to disrupt their competitors and gain a competitive edge,” says Kethan Parbhoo, COO of Microsoft South Africa.
“Now we are in the fourth industrial age that is characterised by the fast pace of technological development and incredible scope of the transformation. In this era, the most successful companies will be the ones that embrace digital transformation to become more engaged with their customers, empower their employees, optimise how they run their business operations and transform their offerings through digital content,” concludes Parbhoo.
