5 great cloud software solutions from which every small business can benefit

The pandemic period has seen the migration towards cloud accelerate. Latest figures from Gartner suggest global cloud software solution spend will grow by sixteen percent in 2022 to $177 billion. The Grant McGregor team identifies some of the solutions within this vast market that could benefit your small business.

Microsoft Teams

There is so much more to Microsoft Teams(1) than video conferencing, although this alone makes it an essential business system for many small and mid-size businesses in today’s new world of remote and hybrid working.

However, the real-time collaboration it enables for documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint is also very attractive for small and mid-size businesses across all industries, especially if you have distributed teams and/or people working from home.

The additional tools for managing your workspace, messaging, collaborating and using Teams Apps make this our number one tool for enhancing and streamlining business operations.

Read about some of our favourite Teams features on our blog:

• 10 new Teams features for 2022

• 8 great Teams features from October 2021

• 8 cool Teams features from July 2021

Canva

Even in today’s world of global marketplaces for creative talent, design can be an expensive cost for many small and mid-size businesses. The sheer number of images and posts required to maintain up-to-date content on your website and social media channels can be quite a burden. Yet we know that posts with images and video boost engagement.

Canva(2) makes it easy to meet these needs. You don’t need to be a designer to create great social images using its handy templates. The templates are optimised for common social channels, so you can easily create optimised images for your social media marketing. The integration with these channels means you can also schedule posts from the app too.

Canva is great if you want to quickly create images that are optimised for social media. It isn’t intended for more free-form or intricate design work. For that, you’ll need to fall back on the old favourite: a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud(3).

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

No matter how small your business, managing your devices, including mobile devices, is an essential part of good governance these days.

The easy way to achieve this is to use the tools available to you within your Microsoft 365 subscription. This way, you have access to enterprise-grade security tools within the cost of the subscription for your essential business apps, including Outlook and Teams.

Using Microsoft Autopilot and Microsoft Intune in combination offers a comprehensive way to provision, manage and secure your devices. It’s a unified solution for managing iOS, Android, PC and Mac devices which (amongst other things) enables cloud-based provisioning to preconfigure new PCs and laptops, the application of security policies to protect business data and selective remote wipe to deal with lost or stolen devices.

Plus, you have access to other security tools within your Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription, such as Microsoft Defender(4).

Quick Books

There are numerous cloud-based solutions for managing your financial accounts if you are a small to mid-size business. Quick Books offers a good range of capabilities while maintaining an affordable price point.

You can find a decent alternative in Xero and Fresh Books and for micro-businesses you can find a completely free option in Zoho.

If you want tight integration with other key business systems, such as warehousing, stock management, or CRM then you might prefer to look at Dynamics 365. This isn’t an easy off-the-shelf solution like Quick Books, Fresh Books or Zoho but if you do have more complex requirements the extra starting effort will pay off.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium

Clearly, the need for effective secure storage of essential business information, records for compliance and digital documents is a key priority for any small and mid-size business.

There is a whole raft of potential solutions in this space, Dropbox being an obvious favourite.

However, we believe that the tight integration throughout the Microsoft suite of products means that your best bet for secure cloud storage is to leverage the tools, such as OneDrive and SharePoint, available within your Microsoft 365 licence. Not only does Microsoft SharePoint enhance your use of Microsoft Teams, you can also leverage its abilities for your Intranet and internal communications.

What next?

If you’d like to initiate or accelerate your own cloud migration, the Grant McGregor team can assist. Please get in touch with our team to discuss your goals.

Call us: 0808 164 4142

Email us: www.grantmcgregor.co.uk/contact-us

Further reading on our blog

Delve into some of our other recent articles about cloud computing:

• Did you know that moving to the cloud could lower your business’ carbon footprint?

• Our thoughts on what a cloud migration strategy should look like in 2022.

• The low-down on backing up your cloud deployment with Axcient.

Sources:

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/teams-for-work

2. https://www.canva.com/en_gb/

3. https://creativecloud.adobe.com/

4. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defender-endpoint/microsoft-defender-antivirus-windows?view=o365-worldwide