December 16, 2016 / by Ben Lloyd AWS

Carry on Christmas

The great thing about the end of December is that many businesses close down so that we can spend time with our friends and family. But in the 24-hour, always-on world of today, these closures are getting shorter – or being cancelled altogether.

In the global marketplace, the Christmas outage can be even more problematic. Significant parts of the world do not celebrate Christmas, and December 25th is just another normal working day.

This presents a problem for businesses planning to shut down. How can they best serve their customers who do not?

Distributed working increases your options

Demand for service, support and sales is likely to drop during December, and your business can probably get by with a skeleton crew. But this means several people still travelling into work to man the phones for calls that never come.

As well as being unpopular with your staff, running the office during quiet periods means providing heat, power and water – often without any kind of reduction to reflect the reduced number of people present. The per head cost of keeping the business running could be considered unacceptable.

It is at this point that the power of the Cloud can come to your assistance. Moving core IT systems into the Amazon AWS Cloud infrastructure means that they can be accessed securely from anywhere by your team. Now instead of people coming into work, they can assist your customers from their home office – or even the kitchen table.

All the tools they need are at their fingertips, without ever having to go to their desk at work. With IT hosted in the Cloud, it’s just a case of redirecting the office phones, and your customers will probably never notice any difference in quality of service received.

Amazon AWS offers a range of benefits – a switch from capital to operational spend, unlimited capacity growth, enhanced security – as well as the ability to build a cost-effective, any place, any time IT system for your business.

The gift that keeps on giving

These same benefits are available all year round too. If you want to shut your business for a week at the end of August, your team can still work from home. And again, your customers will be unable to see any difference in the service they receive.

Taken to the next level, Amazon AWS provides your business with whole new ways to work. There is nothing to stop you building a permanently distributed workforce for instance. You could even employ “local” people in the markets unaffected by Christmas shut-downs if appropriate.

The ability to stay open even when you’re closed also presents a chance to exploit a market that your competitors are choosing not to. If a potential client can’t contact their supplier of choice, they’ll call the next company in their Google search results – and that could be you.

To learn more about Amazon AWS and how Reflexica can help your business profit through the Christmas season, please get in touch.