How is Virtual Office Different from Just Working Remotely?

More employees are working remotely today than ever before. If you have been paying any attention to the news lately, you have noticed that many companies are allowing employees to work remotely for at least the next several months. But is your workforce using a virtual office or just working remotely? 

What is the difference, you may ask? In fact, there are several important differences between a virtual office solution and a squadron of tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Dropbox that merely enable remote collaboration. Here are the four most important differences between a virtual office and just working remotely and why you should seriously consider which one is the best solution for your business.

Hardware Requirements

For some businesses, many servers are needed to keep their business up and running. The business must purchase these servers and maintain them. This can get expensive! IT staff is needed to install the servers and keep patches current. When working remotely, all this infrastructure is still required. Employees are simply accessing the same servers from a different location. Which means that your IT staff still has to be present at a physical location where your servers are kept, and that you need as many IT support specialists as before, which might no longer make sense for your budget. 

However, with a virtual office, the servers can be completely virtual and cloud based. This allows the business to reduce IT setup and overhead costs, providing the much appreciated savings. These virtual servers can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, and employees get the same experience as if they were working in a physical office. It is a win-win for both the business and employee.

Automatic Backups

When employees work remotely, some organizations simply hand their employees a laptop and tell them they can work from home. Surely, your business is smarter than this! How many employees do you think are actually performing regular backups of these devices? The answer is very close to zero.

With a virtual office solution, regular backups can be scheduled automatically. Since employees will access a virtual machine to perform their work instead of a physical computer, the virtual office application can automatically perform these backups on a nightly basis. All the work done and saved on the employees’ computers throughout the day will be backed up each night. This helps ensure that no important work gets lost in the event of a computer failure, and no important files stored on individual machines will be lost or compromised. We are all subject to the occasional coffee spill, right? Using a virtual office removes the worry from data loss because of these types of accidents too since your data is in the cloud and not on a local device!

Security and Firewall Protection

Security breaches are responsible for millions of dollars of damages each year. Depending on what type of data your company uses and stores, a breach can have catastrophic consequences for your business and customers. Employees working remotely can be a big liability as most of them unfortunately are not security experts. Their home networks may have security issues that could allow hackers to access their work device. They might also leave their laptop unlocked or open so that others could potentially access the information contained on it.

With a virtual office, you can rest assured that you get the security your business needs. Even if you have an employee who knows less about cybersecurity than Fred Flintstone, a virtual office setup has everything that your company needs from a security standpoint built into it. Since your data is housed within the virtual machines managed by your services provider, all your data sits behind a robust firewall and is completely secure. You do not have to worry about unauthorized access, and your employees can spend their time getting their work done instead of trying to learn the latest security trends. Leave that up to the experts!

What Would Switching to a Virtual Office Mean for Your Employees? 

The best part is that virtually nothing will change for your employees when you upgrade to a virtual office. They will just need to log into the “office” (so much better than commuting, if you ask us!) and continue with their work as usual. They also won’t need to worry about software updates, updating their permissions and security settings for every application they use, or keeping track of a myriad of passwords. 

With more and more employees working outside the physical office, it is time that your organization rethinks the way you work remotely. Working remotely simply is not good enough in some cases. Virtual office solution like 3sear by 3nom offers important benefits like security, automatic backups, flexible storage options, decreased hardware requirements and many more. Moving to a virtual office setup might even decrease your overall IT expense. Better features and less money…could anyone argue with that? Contact 3nom today to see how to get started with Virtual Office in the next 2 weeks!