By Kirill Bensonoff

Summertime is synonymous with vacation for many of us, whether it’s because the weather’s great or the kids are out of school. Those longer days and sunnier skies mean we all want to get out of the office and experience more of the world.

But being away from your desk doesn’t mean you have to abandon your responsibilities. With the power of the cloud, you can keep things running smoothly wherever your summer adventures take you.

Firstly, every customer you migrate to the cloud removes a requirement for anyone to go onsite. Remote staff can easily do what needs to get done wherever they happen to be located on the mobile device or computer of their choosing.

Earn “brownie points” by letting your team work from the beach or from home during the summer by migrating as much of your business to the cloud as possible. The more remotely accessible your and your customers’ key tools and systems are, the more flexible you can be during vacation season without impacting your overall productivity and bottom line.

But with a well-planned cloud computing strategy, there’s a lot of tasks that shouldn’t require any manual involvement at all. Processes can be easily automated so folks can concentrate on having fun with friends and family while secure with the knowledge that the usual routines will simply occur according to schedule. Investing a little time in scripting these automated workflows to run in your absence means more downtime for you and your team.

And with all your customers’ data in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about data center getting overheating during a summer scorcher or the safety of your physical facilities. You’re redundant without even thinking about it.

Even though you’re checked in at a seaside resort doesn’t mean you have to completely check out either. Cloud-hosted dashboards will give employees a view into critical business metrics from uptime to your pipeline so they can skim the numbers before skipping stones with their kids.

Shifting systems to the cloud also prevents the tricky task of coordinating vacation schedules. When systems are based in the cloud, there’s no need to ensure an on-site presence and employees can take time off whenever it fits their schedule.

Plus, everyone can pack light, as most systems don’t even require a laptop for remote access. With mobile apps and smartphones, many critical tasks can be completed with just a few taps on a screen so folks can get back to their summer fun.

And even if you’re traveling, workaholic customer staff do bring their work on the road with them, relying on cloud solutions provides an additional layer of security in a Bring-Your-Own-Device world. If they lose their laptop or device no one will be able to get access to critical cloud-hosted data because none of it is actually stored locally and permissions and passwords can quickly be reset.

No matter where your staff roams, there shouldn’t be any lag in their performance when you’re using a cloud service. No more VPN connections to locally hosted servers that require dozens of hops and rely on your physical site’s connectivity, with the cloud your team is communicating directly to major cloud provider servers that are built to handle loads of traffic on a global scale.

Empowering workers to complete critical tasks remotely and to stay updated while they’re out of the office is the key to providing workers with flexibility and ensuring your whole business doesn’t grind to a halt when the IT guy takes a vacation or your systems administrator calls in sick. Cloud computing makes this possible while lowering your costs and improving your overall system performance.

About the Author:

Kirill Bensonoff is a seasoned entrepreneur and the founder of Unigma Cloud Management Suite (by Kaseya). Unigma has been featured in a number of publications, and Kirill blogs regularly about cloud, tech and growing your managed services business. He can be reached at [email protected].