Businesses have had to contend with some challenging circumstances in recent years. The first truly global pandemic since the Spanish flu arrived in 2020 in the form of the Covid-19 virus. This forced many businesses to make rapid changes to their digital infrastructure to support remote working in the face of government lockdowns and restrictions on movement. The need to modernize many operations almost overnight was vital to ensure that business continuity could be achieved.
As the most severe effects of the pandemic passed, the ongoing war in Ukraine emerged, which increased the price of energy to many western countries along with the costs of certain staple goods. At present, many countries are facing higher than normal levels of inflation which creates additional challenges.
All these factors demonstrate the need for businesses to modernize their operations so they can remain competitive and secure their long-term commercial viability. In this brief guide, some key ways in which businesses can modernize will be explored.
Complete the move to the cloud
As previously mentioned, millions of businesses needed to adapt to the cCvid-19 pandemic and support remote working. This was achieved by moving key applications to the cloud to ensure that they could be accessed remotely via the internet. This move has been hugely beneficial to businesses in all sectors as it can lead to more efficient ways of working and online systems can be managed more effectively than with conventional local servers.
However, as an increasing number of microservices and applications are held online, there’s a need for them to communicate with each other effectively so complete software platforms can function smoothly and efficiently. This can now be achieved using service mesh kubernetes. In essence, this is a layer of IT infrastructure that manages the communication between separate services or microservices and allows them to function together as part of larger systems. As more services are run together, the need for efficient communication between these systems increases.
Put simply, the effective use of service mesh can be a key driver to upgrade and modernize your online services while ensuring that they work together effectively.
Online training and development packages
Until recently, many forms of training and development packages were delivered face to face between staff and educators, often in a classroom environment. This could be a costly and time-consuming process as specialist staff were needed to train the workforce and onboard new starters.
However, in the digital age, firms can modernize these processes by offering online training and development packages for their staff members. This allows training and development exercises to be accessed from any location without the need to be in a shared physical space. You can read more about the many benefits of online training by clicking here.
Upgrade your website
It’s estimated that around 71% of small businesses have a company website and this figure is expected to grow each year. However, many company websites are basic and don’t promote an enjoyable user experience. In addition, as the number of websites increases online, it may be harder for your company’s site to be visible to the public, especially if competitors have better-performing sites which rank higher on organic search results.
A key way to upgrade your website is to ensure that it obeys SEO best practice. This involves following several requirements such as making each page easy to navigate on multiple devices and ensuring that the pages load quickly. Content must be high quality and authoritative and any product images should be well produced.
A modern, high-performing website will benefit from increased traffic, which will be of significant benefit to any company that sells products online or needs to be more visible to its customers.
