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How have businesses moved online?

Nowadays, it almost seems as if things don’t exist unless they exist online. Although it may be a contradiction in terms, it is in fact completely true. The gradual movement of business to online operations has seen a slow start over the past decade, but has spiked rapidly in the last five years.

Now, the majority of businesses negotiate much of their trade online. But in what specific ways? Below are just a few examples of how both the communication, market and datasphere has changed for good.

Marketing

Social media

Social media now plays a huge part in marketing – social media sites provide not only a huge audience, both local and global, to interact with, but also the way brands are advertised can be a lot subtler.

Creating and “Liking” pages can lead to powerful snowball effect wherein customers and data are obtained easily and without the need for a hard pushing of a brand or a product. Social media also provides companies with extremely accurate data of the particular demographics to which their product appeals.

Location services

All consumer electronics with web capabilities have now begun to include location services as standard. Again, this can be extremely beneficial to companies who operate social media sites as they can successfully direct their advertising and product emphasis on a particular area.

This may be anything from a high percentage of customers located locally (and the need to push more local advertising) right through to globally and the desire to expand and accommodate a burgeoning audience.

The Cloud

Storage

A great deal of companies now store valuable data (such as customer details, invoices and accounts) online via The Cloud. Accounting businesses that have migrated their data online from such systems as Sage One are a prime example of this. Online accounting is a way of making sure that data is secure, and the need for large servers and physical hard drives to store it in the place of work is reduced.

Businesses have begun to do this for a number of reasons, but added security is one of the most prominent. Cloud systems are less vulnerable to online malware, Trojan horses and other potentially damaging viruses. They also provide a backup of a company’s information and customer details should anything happen to the physical server.

Remote access

The remote access features of the Cloud have also changed the way companies interact internally. Remote access has reduced the need to be in the same physical location as the data to access it, meaning that a lot more work can be done on the move, from any location in the world and at any time of the day.