As technology becomes more entrenched in our daily lives, the demand for cloud-based tools has skyrocketed. This is especially true for businesses that need to become more agile and intuitive to keep up with the dynamic market situations.
In fact, a study found that more than 94% of the companies used cloud services for 83% of their workloads alone in 2020. Needless to say, the seamless collaboration provided by cloud computing is a necessity in the current scenario.
With businesses becoming increasingly mobile, remote collaboration lets multiple teams work together, and be in sync, from anywhere around the world.
Cloud collaboration tools provide a convenient, affordable, and scalable method to collaborate, interact and seamlessly communicate with employees. HR teams and managers can easily track the progress of different teams at any point in time. Cloud collaboration is simple yet effective.
Here’s how: with the right tools, remote collaboration can be highly profitable for a business of all scales, regardless of the industry it operates in. According to research by Forbes, businesses find cloud collaboration to be an efficient way to boost productivity, enhance innovation and accelerate business results. In fact, these days, companies spend a considerable amount of their budget on remote collaboration tools.
What is cloud collaboration?
Cloud collaboration is an effective team collaboration method that enables remote employees to work together in a hassle-free manner.
It allows the users to view, edit, suggest and share work in real-time. All the changes are updated and saved instantly on the cloud, allowing members to access the upgraded version of the project whenever they wish to.
Here are some more benefits of cloud collaboration that can redefine your business operations.
Benefits of cloud collaboration
Enhanced team collaboration
Sharing work in a cloud-based online space makes it simple for everyone to access it. It eliminates the hassle of sending personal emails and texts to the owner of the document.
Anyone with the link to the file can access the latest version of it in minutes. They can make suggestions, offer feedback and share ideas to drive better results. They can even edit or add to the document with ease. This allows for a higher degree of employee participation and saves the time spent waiting for information, updates and decisions.
What’s more? It increases employee productivity, enhances team collaboration and spurs creativity by allowing them to communicate with one another while working simultaneously.
Quicker access to important files
One of the most annoying tasks when it comes to online collaboration is sharing large files. Most email services do not support documents greater than a few megabytes, making it difficult to share work constantly.
But worry no more, the cloud has got you covered!
It allows you to upload files directly onto the cloud storage without any limitations on the size and format of the file. You can upload multiple kinds of project files — videos, audio or word files with extreme ease.
Employees no longer need not share information through external storage devices. The cloud can quickly store and share heavy files without disrupting workflows. Just upload the file online and share the link with your colleagues in a moment.
The backbone of a remote team
A robust cloud collaboration plays a massive role in a remote team’s success. It allows teams to work and collaborate and complete their deadlines faster and more efficiently.
Put simply, these cloud-based applications maintain the balance between remote operations and employee productivity. They offer flexibility and scalability to the remote workforce to work according to their tasks and requirements. Never mind the fact that cloud storage also comes with a lot of security, meaning all your data stays safe.
The bigger bonus of the collaboration is the 24x7 access to the documents and files shared. It gives an equal opportunity to each employee to share their inputs and suggestions.
Without the presence of cloud storage, the concept of remote employees would not have been this popular.
Prompts the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy
Did you know, according to Microsoft, more than 67% of employees use personal devices at work?
Well, using a personal device at work has always been gratifyingly accepted by employees.
A study by Cisco showed that 69% of the companies believe, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy improves an employees’ work efficiency. They tend to work for at least two extra hours when they have access to their own device.
That being said, cloud collaboration promotes the BYOD policy of a company by enabling the employees to log in from their devices and access the company data without the need for connection over a secluded private network or a VPN.
Top five features of cloud collaboration that make it a go-to solution for all businesses
24x7 access to the shared work
The cloud collaboration applications offer 24x7 accessibility to all mobile devices and web browsers. The best part? You can even work on these files when you are offline. Teams can view, edit and modify work even without the internet and simply upload and share the upgraded version of the work once the internet is back again.
Real-time communication
Team collaboration channels, instant messaging, message boards, and comments are some of the robust features of the cloud that offer real-time communication. These allow employees to instantly share and discuss their ideas using real-time comments, chats and audio messages.
Say, you want to give inputs on your colleague’s work. With cloud communication, you can directly comment on the document and save the time of personally texting or mailing the changes.
Custom permission levels
Today, privacy is a legitimate concern. However, cloud collaboration secures all the sensitive data of your company. Employees can limit access and give it only to the people they want to share their work with.
For instance, you want to share the essential work guidelines and project patterns with your employees. You can go to the settings and set the custom permission level as per your choice.
The collaboration tool also allows changing the settings to ‘view only’ so that no one can make unnecessary changes to the document once something is finalised. It gives you the authority to decide who can view, edit or comment on the file created by you.
Control over the edit versions
The cloud collaboration tool automatically saves and syncs the changes done in the document. It ensures all the members get access to the latest version of the work file at all times.
In addition to this, it offers access to all the previous versions and even highlights the new changes in the document. The added perk? It clearly shows the editor’s name and the time at which the changes were made.
Centralised file storage
One of the most important features of a cloud collaboration tool is its ability to build a private space to save all the work-related data of an organisation.
It acts as the company storage that allows employees to access files and collaborate systematically. It also ensures that files remain accessible to all employees, even after the creator of that file has left the organisation.
Significant challenges faced while implementing cloud collaboration
Too many applications
Due to an increase in the number of remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have drastically increased.
On average, a company uses 15–16 Saas apps for all their operations. Perhaps, introducing another application for cloud collaboration can cause perplexity and confusion.
Therefore, you need to decide the usage of each tool to differentiate among the functionalities of each one of them. Make sure that you do not integrate it with the existing tool network and keep the data from mixing and creating multiple copies of the same thing.
Absence of a good collaboration strategy
Irrespective of how advanced or feature-full your cloud collaboration tool may be, it won’t do any good unless collaboration is a part of your company culture. Fostering such a culture means ensuring that collaboration is implemented across all levels, and encouraged by upper management and team leaders.
You must design collaborative strategies that meet your needs and encourage employees to collaborate and communicate with each other. Asking for others’ inputs and ideas can also help in drafting the right strategy.
Wrapping it up
Cloud collaboration is an excellent method to promote employee communication and engagement, irrespective of the business’ geography, nature and size. It makes the transition to remote setups incredibly smooth and easy.
Given the way the business world is changing, choosing the right tool that integrates seamlessly with all your applications and IT configurations is essential to adapt and meet the changing consumer demands.
In a nutshell, cloud collaboration tools eliminate the communication silos faced by employees and help businesses deliver higher-quality interactions.
We hope this article helped you understand the concept of cloud collaboration and how it can benefit your company. All the best for your future work!
