GTB IT Solutions

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Move safely to the Cloud

Massive changes are happening today in business information technology – very likely you can benefit from them.

Depending on your situation you can get lower costs, more capability and more resilience.

There are also real risks and costs to consider.

GTB can guide you through the pros and cons of how best to use the Cloud in your situation, then set up and support your new improved system. We routinely help people to move all or some of their business to the Cloud and have in our constantly evolving tool bag many solutions which we recommend and are expert at, including notably:

Business Grade Email with Office 365

Office 365 Email is a great step up.   When you and your team know and like using Outlook, it’s a “must”.  Moving from Exchange Server you dramatically lower costs, reduce or eliminate the need for your own server. Moving from a “non-business-grade” email, you get easy, seamless access and data sharing across multiple devices, for all your team. If an Exchange Server was beyond your budget previously, then Office 365 Email brings this level of functionality within your reach now.

Secure File Storage with Dropbox for Business

Dropbox is the no. 1 most widely-used, easy to use and reliable Cloud File Storage service world-wide.  Dropbox Pro and Dropbox Business bring all the ease-of-use from the free Dropbox version,  adding extra storage space, and all the file administration features any serious enterprise or organisation needs. Set up properly,  Dropbox can add significant value to the operations of many businesses,  save you hardware and support costs, and massively improve access to documents.

Workflow with WorkflowMax

As qualified WorkflowMax advisors since 2015, we believe using a “well suited” Workflow tool can add significant value to the right business, reducing wasted/lost time spent by your staff. If your business does quotes, jobs, projects, and needs to track time, budget accurately and invoice accurately, then WorkflowMax or another Workflow tool may reduce costs, increase staff satisfaction, and provide crucial insights into your business.

Applications

New industry/function specific applications based in the Cloud are appearing all the time and can be valuable to your business. Likewise, many established business applications are being migrated to the Cloud. GTB can advise you on this, and help you create an IT environment that ensures you can take advantage of them.

I just wanted to say thanks very much for your and your team’s efforts in getting our new email system up and running. We were really impressed with your advice about what we needed, and then your commitment to ensuring we were on the new system ahead of our (unreasonably!) tight deadline. As always your team were great to deal with, and a the new email system is fantastic – much faster and reliable, and we can now access our emails from anywhere. Thanks again for your work; we really appreciate it.

Hamish Cameron - Waikanae Law

GTB’s service has been outstanding! ... made it easy to understand the technical aspects of taking over our new company and moving it to the cloud.

Louise Knight - Co-owner, Washbar (NZ) Ltd

When we decided to shift the practice into “the cloud”, GTB made this process simple. The move to “the cloud” has made a huge difference to how we are able to do things in the office, it means I can basically run the office from anywhere that has internet access. With the opening of a second branch, the ability to be offsite is so important. We also signed up for VoIP phones which are saving us money and keep the two offices connected efficiently

Trish Amor-Davy - Owner, Best Practice Law, Waikanae

Check out our pages dealing with IT for new business, driving growth and Servers & Virtualisation.

“Cloud 101”

Here are some key points to consider regarding Cloud solutions and your business:

Internet – If you rely on the Cloud, then you absolutely need to have a reliable, fast Internet connection. If your Internet is slow, then your staff will be slowed down.  If your Internet is unreliable, you will likely lose income and goodwill whenever there is an outage. UFB (Fibre, Ultra Fast Broadband) is fast, reliable and always recommended where available. Even UFB can go down though, so we usually recommend and supply an automatic failover to Wireless to kick in if ever the UFB goes down. And for locations without UFB we’ll work with you to determine the best available option.

Data – When you move to the Cloud, it is still your data. So you still need to know where your data is, how secure it is, and what can go wrong. Such as – your Cloud provider goes out of business, or is investigated by a non-NZ government agency, or is sold. For any of those reasons you might lose access to your critical data. The risks storing your data

Lock-in – While any software can become critical to your business, just keep in mind that the same is true with Cloud based software – it can become quite an issue if you wish to change, or stop paying them.

Features & Usability – New software becoming available is frequently designed with ease of use access to powerful features in mind – and online software providers are a leading part of this innovation.

SaaS – Short for ‘Software as a Service’, with this model rather than paying for the software when you first ‘buy’ it, instead your ‘rent’ the software on a month by month basis. One the one hand this means you pay a generally affordable monthly fee which is expensed in your accounts and you may also save by not having to have the application living locally on expensive hardware you own. On the other hand these monthly fees can add up to something quite significant over time.

The Cloud is here to stay, and GTB can help you bring its advantages to your business.

Contact GTB now