Over 100 countries have enforced partial or complete lockdown owing to the rising numbers in this global pandemic. Our daily lives have been upended, and virtual experiences have become increasingly commonplace. With social distancing being practiced almost everywhere, daily operations have come to a standstill in many sectors, and organizations around the world are on a quest to find ways to avoid business disruption during this time. The most prominent challenge organizations face is maintaining operations while the majority of their workforce work remotely.
How are businesses evolving to keep up with the changes of today?
Most companies, traditionally, use on-premise software and infrastructure to power through their day to day activities. However, with the remote working practice being the new normal for the foreseeable future, enterprises are gradually shifting towards a cloud infrastructure model for business continuity. Business-critical data and other application infrastructures are being moved to the cloud so that employees may connect from anywhere in the world at their convenience.
Cloud infrastructure facilities are eminently agile and scalable. The cloud model for an organization will depend on its unique business and computing needs. The ability of a cloud-based model to scale up or down, based on the spikes or dips in its requirement, is one of its more attractive features.
Adopting cloud-based infrastructure will also reduce cost overheads for the company. Legacy on-premise infrastructure systems is typically a substantial one-time investment regardless of the scale and with subsequent upgrades incurring more cost to the company. Since organizations are typically looking at reducing overall costs, deploying cloud services is advantageous, as most of them have pay-as-you-use models.
Enterprises often have the need to store critical, sensitive information pertaining to their business. Cloud infrastructure is useful for these organizations, too, as it adopts robust security measures that consist of authentication methods and protocols that steadfastly work to protect the data in them.
During these remote working times, employers will also need to monitor their daily employee turnout and keep track of their working hours. Adopting cloud-based, online attendance systems can be the perfect solution to this challenge.
How are organizations keeping track of their workforce during these times?
Generally, organizations have on-premise card-based systems, manual punch in methods or biometric fingerprint systems that record the attendance of each employee in the company. Most businesses do not have efficient systems in place to tackle the current eventuality of their employees working from different locations. With the current scenario, since remote working has become the new normal, HR professionals and company leaders have started looking at alternate methods to keep track of their workforce.
Cloud-based time attendance and workforce management systems help in this regard by allowing employees to punch in and out anywhere, anytime. On-premise employees can practice contactless methods and make use of attendance systems that have interactive facial recognition functionality enabled in them. Employees who log in virtually from remote locations can make use of workforce management systems that have mobile apps enhanced with facial recognition capabilities. Each employee’s attendance is recorded accurately in the system in real-time. The data entered by the employee is captured and stored in real-time in these cloud-based systems, and can be retrieved with 100% accuracy from any part of the world.
The COVID-19 outbreak has forced organizations to adopt new methods and change the nature of their operations. Restrictions on travel have enabled companies to adopt workforce methods that were unheard of in many organizations. Enterprises have truly understood the power of cloud technology and it has reinstated the need to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure innovation so that their operations remain undisrupted during these unpredictable times.