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5 London Startups That Were Started During the Pandemic

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Ever since businesses were forced to start working remotely due to the pandemic, Cloud technology has become a hugely important technology. It has been around for many years now, there are thousands of IT Support Companies who have helped businesses with cloud computing, but it gained new levels of importance for businesses that were suddenly needing to send their employees home, whilst setting the company up to enable work to carry on outside of the office. Employees needed to be able to access all the necessary company resources from their home.

Another major challenge of working remotely during the pandemic was equipping employees with the technology they needed to work effectively. Making sure all users had a laptop that they would work on was something businesses needed to work out urgently, to maintain business continuity. Then there was the issue of whether users were going to be working on their own personal laptops – in which case, there needed to be certain measures taken to protect company data.

Of course, there were already ready-made solutions for working from home available. Many companies were utilizing remote work solutions for many years before the pandemic happened. Products such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure were already enabling remote work by helping businesses migrate to the Cloud. Think about how beneficial it is for a business to have its very own Azure Expert on hand to help with Azure related queries? Businesses could host all their critical infrastructure in Microsoft Azure’s datacenters, and onboard all of their users to Microsoft 365 – the fully cloud-based suite of apps and services, such as Microsoft Teams, Office, and SharePoint.

Microsoft have also recently announced a new service: Windows 365. This is a service allows businesses to roll out Cloud PCs to their users. A Cloud PC is Microsoft’s term for a plug and play virtual desktop solution that is easy to onboard users onto.

It seems like utilizing Cloud Computing to provide end users with desktop experiences could be the future of home PCs. We’ve seen how, in particular, IT Support for Accountants has had a huge focus on better communication and collaboration using cloud software. There are some considerable advantages to this approach. For example, having the software residing in Cloud infrastructure could make it much quicker and easier to fix issues, because it could all be done remotely. Certainly, Microsoft 365 business users that receive IT Support or Managed Services would see a drastic reduction in downtime if IT issues no longer required some to come and physically look at their PC.

Currently Windows 365 is only for business use, but the announcement of the platform could mean that sometime in the future, they will announce a commercial Cloud PC solution for personal use. This could end up being the way that consumers access their desktops as well.