There must be many a worker wondering about the delights of working in the (nice warm) cloud – the benefits on a day like today being clear for everyone to see.

Whether or not you opt for a complete move over to cloud working, as WebProductive often suggests, there is no arguing that a company could and should have a cloud productivity suite as a (disaster recovery type) back-up.

Imagine, you’re still an off-line tethered company – that’s fine – maybe you use Microsoft Office, MS Exchange for email (and so on) – but out the office, when you’re not able to be on a work computer, what do you do?  I know a company which is pretty short sighted like that – it uses VPN to connect to shared-drives full of docs, uses MS office, and MS Exchange (incidentally, the Exchange server sits in the same office building). What this essentially means is that working remotely on a non work computer is a challenge to say the least. What is also means is that if you can’t get to your work computer, or the office, you won’t be doing any work today!

Now imagine this – a company still is tethered in the off-line quagmire, but also has a fail-safe ‘on-line’ working mode – consisting of an on-line sync of key documents to shared folders, on-line web based calendar, email and productivity tools. These cheap and (relatively) painless additions to the IT department armoury mean the whole company can continue to function when inclement weather hits. Get cracking on your back-up plan now, and with a little bit of technical jiggery-pokery, and a smattering of training and change management, you’ll be good to go for the next snowy bout (unless it’s next week).

Compare this relatively small additional cost of a price-per-user scenario versus the larger lost revenue due to hours of worker downtime that will be occurring across the UK economy today.