At IT Champion, we love working with some of the biggest charities and non-profit organisations in the UK. We understand you need to keep costs low and systems simple to free up money and time that’s better spent working on your important causes – that’s why we’ve helped many charities migrate to Office 365 from their traditional way of working. Here’s 5 reasons we think you should make the leap too, so get in touch with us at any time for a free assessment of your cloud readiness.
1. Save Time & Money
We understand that a lot of non-profit organisations have many mobile and remote workers, needing to travel between locations and sites at a moment’s notice. Before, technology could have made this extremely difficult. With Office 365 your files and folders are synced across all your staff devices, wherever they are, making a flexible working life an easy reality.
A huge use of time for many IT departments can be maintaining and carrying out updates. When you move some or all of your business practices to the cloud, you can focus your time and attention elsewhere, while the updates are installed automatically. This also means you’re not having to budget in for the cost of buying, installing and managing upgrades every few years.
Your team will have more time to focus on the bigger picture, including concentrating more of your IT budget on progress and investment.
2. Familiar Tools
There’s no need for high staff training costs, as the Office 365 package contains the same capabilities as the desktop applications that your staff are likely to be familiar with, and they’re regularly updated so you’ll always have access to the newest version.
This combined with new tools such as SharePoint, which you can use to offer document management and storage to your employees, and to ‘connect, share, and stay informed.’
3. Security and Protection
Considering the important and personal data charities are likely to hold, there’s no room for error when it comes to security. When you utilise Office 365, your data is sat safely in the hands of the Microsoft data centre, ensuring it’s being protected by the highest levels of security.
“At the service level, Office 365 uses the defence-in-depth approach to provide physical, logical, and data layers of security features and operational best practices. In addition, Office 365 gives you enterprise-grade user and admin controls to further secure your environment.”
Your data is also stored on multiple servers as a redundancy measure, to ensure there’s no chance of your data being lost if one server goes wrong. This is a clear step up from your data being in an on-premise solution, which is unlikely to meet the same standard of security.
4. Flexibility
Office 365 also offers optional extras, such as anti-virus and malware protection, which can be added on to your package as and when you need them.
Scalability is one of the key benefits of Office 365, due to the flexibility it gives your organisation. Taking on a lot of new staff at once? No problem – you can easily scale up your requirements and pull back in when you need to. This allows you to grow your charity or non-profit at your own pace, with IT systems that adapt to your needs.
5. It’s Cost Effective
Last but not least – Office 365 is offered at a free or discounted price to charities, through the Office 365 Non-Profit pricing plans. You can get email, cloud file storage, web conferencing, and all your Office applications and services, for a few pounds a month per user.
