How to Address Cloud Waste & Streamline Your App Use
The drive towards cloud adoption of the last few years, and especially during the pandemic, has allowed businesses to improve flexibility and business continuity.
Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365, G Suite, and others, enable teams to work from anywhere and still keep business processes running.
But just because a company had moved to the cloud, doesn’t mean their cloud use is as efficient as it could be. In fact, recent cloud use statistics show us that companies are struggling with how to streamline and optimize their use of the cloud.
For example, according to Blissfully’s 2020 SaaS Trends Report:
- Companies are churning through 30% of their apps annually
- The number of unique apps in use by company is up by about 30%
- SaaS waste has doubled year-over-year
These statistics show that companies are trying to find the right apps for their business workflows, but often are using too many different apps and ending up dropping apps after they begin using them for one reason or another.
Cloud waste is costly for a number of reasons:
- Training time for a new app is costly
- Employees begin to lose faith that the company is going to stick with an app
- Companies end up paying for SaaS subscriptions with redundancies
- Forward motion is lost when a company has to rework their processes in a new application
If constant app churn and inefficient processes sounds familiar, read on for how to go through a streamlining process and make your cloud use more productive and cost efficient.
Improve Your Company’s Use of the Cloud
Survey Employees About SaaS Tools
One mistake that many companies make is to decide at the executive level what cloud applications to use. They don’t include the people using the tools in the decision-making process.
This leads to apps being chosen that cause problems for a company workflow that are only identified after a company has already gone through a transition process to the new tool.
Your cloud streamlining should begin with the people that are using the tools day in and day out to run your business. Put together an employee survey for employees that asks some of the following questions:
- What cloud applications do you currently use? (this will help you identify any you don’t know about)
- What 3 applications are ones that you could not do without, and why?
- What 3 applications would you like to eliminate or replace, and why?
- What applications do you wish our company was using?
- Where do you see redundancies in our cloud applications?
- Do you have any areas of your work where you have to key data into an application or spreadsheet?
You can make the survey process even easier by using a tool like Microsoft Forms to create and share your survey online.
Consolidate Your Applications
The more unique apps your employees have to switch between during the day, the less productive they are.
On average, employees toggle between apps 10 times per hour, and this constant switching equates to 32 days in lost productivity per year per employee.
You want to make your team’s workflow as easy as possible and this is done by consolidating applications. Platforms such as Microsoft 365 offer one main interface that includes multiple productivity apps that all work together.
For example, using Microsoft Teams, employees can do the following tasks all without leaving the app:
- Video conference
- Message with team members
- Share files
- Launch Microsoft programs
- Collaborate on files with team members
- Make and receive phone calls, through a VoIP add-on
- Check team member status
- Launch 3rd party apps, files, webpages
- Access a corporate Wiki
The goal is to use as few applications as possible to streamline and reduce the need to constantly switch apps.
Integrate and Automate
With a fully streamlined cloud workflow, you should not have anyone needing to manually key information from one app into another. You want all your apps to be connected so they can share data seamlessly and automate tasks.
For example, if you have an online shopping cart, you want to use tools that allow new sales to transfer into your accounting program AND your CRM program automatically, so all data is available instantly without time-consuming manual entry.
This not only frees up staff for more productive tasks, it reduces the risk of entry errors.
Review Your Cloud Plan Annually
Once you get an optimized cloud plan in place, its important to keep it optimized. You want to review your cloud infrastructure annually. This is not to completely revamp it, but to look for any small tweaks and optimizations you can use to make it better.
Get Help Putting Together a Cost-Efficient Cloud Strategy
Quantum PC Services can help your Sturgeon Bay business review your current use of SaaS tools, eliminate redundancies and unnecessary costs, and help you optimize.
Contact us today to learn more! Call 920-256-1214 or reach us online.
