In its very core, the “cloud” enables users to store and access data anytime and anywhere from almost any device connected through the internet. Global research and advisory company Gartner predicts that by 2021, more than half of global enterprises already using cloud today will adopt an all-in cloud strategy. It also said that global spending on cloud services will reach $260 billion this year.

Both large and small companies can benefit from cloud services like data storage and backup, and mobile working among others. Small business owners especially can take advantage of cloud services to make their operations more efficient while cutting costs and scaling resources at the same time.

To effectively integrate these in your operations, you will need a team of cloud management experts dedicated to oversee various cloud functions in your business. While you can have your IT team take on this role, outsourcing your own dedicated cloud management team is more advantageous for the following reasons:

Cost-efficiency

With the implementation of cloud-based services in your company, it is important to train your cloud management team so that you can optimize the use of the cloud’s capabilities. Training staff can cause your company a lot of money and if you plan on hiring a full in-house team, acquisition can also be pricey and sometimes unnecessary especially for smaller businesses.

When you outsource, however, you can cut on these costs without sacrificing the quality of service. You guarantee that your team will manage your cloud services expertly while you focus on bringing clients in and keeping them satisfied.

Improved Cybersecurity

Since cloud services are wholly dependent on the internet, they are more prone to cyber attacks, and as technology advances, new and more sophisticated malware that are more difficult to defend against are also developed. Your dedicated team of cloud management experts has extensive knowledge about these looming cybersecurity threats and will know how to defend and protect your data from them, easing the burden from your IT team.

Compliance Support

Another great thing that cloud management experts can do for you is to make sure that your company adheres to data regulations and privacy laws. This is especially necessary for businesses that handle sensitive and personal data such as online retailers, healthcare provides, and financial institutions.

But a team of cloud management experts can monitor public cloud configurations with regulatory standards, your company is assured not only of maintaining compliance but of upholding the best practices for data security as well.

Backups and Disaster Recovery

Technical issues like loss of data or applications, which can be detrimental to the entire business, is one of the cons of cloud services. However, don’t let this discourage you from adapting this technology in your operations since you can always routinely perform data backup and have recovery options to save data once disaster strikes with the help of your cloud management team. 

Expert Support and Knowledge

The way cloud services work may sound simple, but navigating the public cloud sphere and other interweaving elements is not an easy task. This is why outsourcing knowledgeable and highly skilled cloud management experts is something you should really consider as they have insight into the public cloud market, an in-depth understanding of vendors and how they operate, and familiarity with the latest trends and services that can help in the successful and seamless implementation of cloud in your business.

All in all, outsourcing your cloud management team allows owners to focus more on what they do best for the company and reach your business goals.

Right Partner, Great Team

Partnering with the right outsourcing company can give you access to a team of cloud management specialists that include System/Cloud Administrators, DevOps Engineers, and Solution Architects with proficient knowledge of various operating systems from Windows to Linux. These teams will help you improve your department’s productivity by ensuring faster response to alerts generated by monitoring systems, quick troubleshooting availability or performance issues on your systems and streamlined approach in providing technical support to your clients.

The right partner also creates endless opportunities for your company to realize your full potential with >97% client retention rate founded on trust and open communication. Having an extensive and profound expertise in cloud management also allows you to build a great cloud management team of experts for your unique needs with up to 70% operational cost savings.

They usually have access to world-class talent that will be meticulously sourced and screened through A+ Recruitment process. As your business demands shift, so can your outsourced team with a guaranteed operational excellence thru collaborative Service Level Agreement, metrics-intensive performance, and open communication. Look for an ISO 27001 and 9001 certified and GDPR-compliant outsourcing company, so your company and client’s data are always safe. 

Partnership with Infinit-O

Infinit-O’s mission is to create endless opportunities for your company to realize its full potential.

We can build you a great, high-performing Cybersecurity team:

• Threat Intelligence Analyst
•  Systems/Cloud Administrator
• AWS and Azure DevOps Engineer
• IT Technical Assistant
• Information Technology Team
• IT Operation Analyst
• IT Operation Engineer
• Others

Let’s work together to build a great Cybersecurity Team.

Start small. Exceed expectations. Think infinitely. Think Infinit-O.

The benefits of a great Research and Data team should never be underestimated.

To create a solid business strategy, your R&D team is responsible for devising plans and next steps for your company through market research. They consolidate systematic data and make objective collection and analysis of data about your target market, your competition, and/or environment which later is the basis on how you can achieve your business goals.

Therefore, building a great team is a good investment and asset for your business. The following will explain why:

1. Helps you identify opportunities in the marketplace

A great R&D team can gather all necessary information about your market wants and needs. Through this, you’ll have enough ammunition to formulate the most effective way to communicate to your customers and identify what they want and don’t want from your products or services. Then you can tailor your business approach based on this information into growing your business and creating loyal customers.

2. Helps minimize operational risks

Through the research that your R&D team gathers, you can discover threats and pinpoint areas for improvement about your business making you refrain from making abrupt and uncalculated decisions. At the same time, they will help you get enlightened with further developments that suit your intended market.  Any form of research can be utilized as an insurance policy against both obvious dangers and threats in your industry.

3. Helps you establish trends and market positioning

The market research that your R&D team periodically conduct unravels data about trends in your industry. These trends can be used as a basis for identifying where your business is at a particular position in time. Information from market research helps you benchmark and monitor your progress, which can be useful to make decisions and take action.

4. Helps you determine the right promise for your business

Every company has its own business promise. It’s easy to conceptualize a vision and mission statement but putting them in action might be a different story. Your R&D team can help you define your brand’s promise based on assessing your business capabilities, resources and outcome from the existing business efforts. Through it, you can tweak and refine your promise with the assurance that you can actually make it happen. 

5. Helps discover business compromise

Your R&D team can identify new business angles from structured and scientific ways. For example, you launched a new product or service, the market research team can create unbiased and emotionally detached analysis whether these new offers are working and effective. In return, you’d be able to reconsider other ways to improve your services and create compromises that will help your company benefit from.

6. Helps you stay ahead of the competition

Great R&D teams are relentless in understanding your business and the industry where your company revolves on. With their combined curiosity and willingness to innovate, the research results can be your leverage in determining insights from your competitors which you can use to your advantage by either adapting to their business approach and connect it with your own or make necessary reinventions that work for you.

How to build a Great Research and Data Team

Having the right R&D team is important to help you accomplish your business goals. Overall, they efficiently help you with increasing business productivity and putting your assets in the right places. But building this team has its own set of challenges. The main hurdle is hiring resources because there is a limited pool of talent in the research and data industry and that the number of highly qualified candidates are in return shrinking.

One way to overcome this is by finding the right outsourcing partner who has access to world-class R&D talents who can find the best people fit your unique business needs and will equip and certify your team according to your requirements. With the right partner, you can also save up to 70% on operational costs, yet assuring your team’s efficiency and productivity.

Partnership with Infinit-O

Infinit-O’s mission is to create endless opportunities for your company to realize its full potential.

We can build you a great, high-performing R&D team:

• Research Analyst
• Account Research Specialist
• Business Analyst
• Database Maintenance Specialist
• Product Ops Developer
• Cybersecurity Specialist
• Systems Integration Developer
• Threat Intelligence Analyst
• Threat Landscape Analyst
• Systems Administrator
• Other R&D Experts

Let’s work together to build a great Research and Data Team.

Start small. Exceed expectations. Think infinitely. Think Infinit-O.

Market research tools have come a long way. The innovation of these tools have made the arduous task easier and more seamless. This blog tackles identifying the best market research tools for your business and how to efficiently use them.

But first, let’s cover the basics.

What is Market Research and its importance?

A process of gathering information to improve, evolve and craft products and services that your customers both need and want. Without proper market research, you’d end up spending your company’s capital in wrong places.

Market research allows you to understand your customer’s behaviour, your competitor’s best practices and deduce marketing channels to grow your business.

To reap the full benefits of market research, you can leverage on the following tools for your company.

Best Tools for Market Research

1. Social Mention

This is an online tool that enables you to gather real-time social media data on any site. By typing the website’s URL, the tool pulls all the social media mentions related to that site. 

Tool Strengths:

• See social media footprint for your brand across all the media platforms without having to aggregate the data yourself
• Data and search results are laid out in a simple and easy to read format
• Discover where and why your competitors are being mentioned to help you tailor your own marketing efforts
• Know the hashtag, sources, and keywords most frequently associated to a target URL

2. Survey Monkey

A tool that gathers direct customer insights. You can create a survey or set of questions that are best answered by your customers to understand  lead generation, conversion rates and customer retention rate.

Tool Strengths:

• Survey is both PC and mobile compatible making it convenient for your customers/respondents
• Can be integrated with other softwares and platforms
• Has reporting features that enables easy analysis of survey results
• Very user-friendly, can create surveys with only few clicks

3. Google Analytics

Although its entirety is not technically a wider tool in market research, Google Analytics can provide your customers behaviour whilst on your website. It shows which products are viewed most and it also illustrates what social media channels your customers are responding to.

Tool Strengths:

• It automatically collect data that gives you immediate access to reports
• Easy integration with third party tools basing on the strategy and the information you want to extract
•  Find top marketing campaigns in terms of traffic and conversions
• Determine the location of your best visitors

4. GrowthBar

Perfect market research tool because it provides instant access to your competitors critical data points and their growth channels as well keywords that are working for them by giving you SEO, SEM, and Facebook advertising access.

Tool Strengths:

• A simple Chrome extension that instantly allows you to do market research using your Google search page
• Explore your competitors’ backlink data, social signals, keywords rank, best performing keywords and even spy on their facebook ads
• most complete market research tool that is 100% free to try and more affordable than any alternative

Great Tool, Great Team

Having the right tool for your Research and Data Team is vital to help them accomplish their tasks easier and quicker. By doing so, your business’s overall efficiency and productivity can also increase. By having the right tools, it allows your R&D team to produce the most usable research that your company can benefit on.

But dealing with these tools can be overwhelming. Building a team of R&D experts and training them on utilizing these tools births another layer of operational responsibility especially and deviates your focus on your core responsibilities. In addition, there is a limited pool of talent in the research and data industry and the number of highly qualified candidates are in return shrinking.

One way to overcome this is by finding the right outsourcing partner who has access to world-class R&D talents who can equip and certify your team to put these tools to good use. The  tools mentioned above along with other market research tools can also be expensive and can  potentially break your bank. But with the right partner, you can save up to 70% on operational costs, yet assuring your team’s efficiency and productivity.

Partnership with Infinit-O

Infinit-O’s mission is to create endless opportunities for your company to realize its full potential.

We can build you a great, high-performing R&D team:

• Research Analyst
• Account Research Specialist
• Business Analyst
• Database Maintenance Specialist
• Product Ops Developer
• Cybersecurity Specialist
• Systems Integration Developer
• Threat Intelligence Analyst
• Threat Landscape Analyst
• Systems Administrator
• Other R&D Experts

Let’s work together to build a great Research and Data Team.

Start small. Exceed expectations. Think infinitely. Think Infinit-O.

The World Health Organization (WHO) did not only report the increasing number of cases on the COVID-19 pandemic but also a significant swell in the number of cyberattacks since the remote work transition, through email scams targeting the general public. Sometime in April 2020, about 450 active WHO email login credentials were leaked online along with others working on the novel coronavirus response. Although the leaked credentials did not entirely put the WHO systems at risk, the attack dampened an older extranet system, used by current and retired staff as well as WHO organization partners.

According to the Modern Bank Heist research, surveyed from 25 CIOS and major financial institutions, 80% of the firms have experienced more cyberattacks which results in an increase of 13% year-over-year. Overall, the pandemic has been connected to a 238% surge in cyberattacks against banks. But because the pandemic has forced everyone to depend on the digital medium, organizations and people are forced to adapt to the current situation and this has made everyone become digitally dependent to maintain normalcy with everyday life despite the risks.

Unfortunately, only 51% of technology professionals and leaders are saying that their cybersecurity teams are equipped to detect and respond to the rising digital pandemic and only 59% are saying that their cybersecurity team has the needed tools and resources at home to perform their job effectively. The proliferation of these attacks may eventually lead to business jeopardy. Luckily, most of these can be forestalled by sound cyber hygiene and training employees on information security to increase their digital vigilance. 

The Role of Technology and IT Companies

In the wake of this crisis, IT companies can invest in robust email-filtering software, mandatory employee training regarding phishing emails and building a great cybersecurity team that they can outsource from trusted partners.  In addition, companies may want to consider whether they have proper network segmentation given the limited administrative access and credential protocols, which includes but not limited to multi-factor authentication and password management systems. To adhere to this demand, having an alliance with outsourcing partners can help the technology and IT industry to respond accordingly in the digital transformation era.

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As cyberattacks continue to mount during this pandemic, many businesses and companies are scouting help from technology and IT companies. The demand for cybersecurity support is as high as the need for medical allies because the pandemic is not just on physical health but also digital health. Hence, there is a need for cybersecurity and IT specialists to address this dilemma. Therefore this industry has a big role to play.

Aside from having ample knowledge on these cyber attacks, the technology and IT industry should expect a surge of technical support needs from different companies as more and more businesses are in need of advanced IT consultancy. Rapid-response support services composed of certified IT professionals and threat analysts that are committed to building and implementing the most effective cybersecurity infrastructure for any businesses is equally important to have.

Partnership and Support

And since most if not all companies are now sourcing these skilled workers because of the new remote work set up, hiring limitations arise. There is a challenge to scout for the best people to do the job with the limited training opportunities and face-to-face skill transfer. Companies need individuals to put on board without the obligation to teach them the twists and turns of the IT industry. To put it simply, those who are already experts in the field. This is where outsourcing companies come in. 

Partnership with Infinit-O

Infinit-O’s aim is to create long lasting partnerships and endless opportunities for your institution while managing the sudden demand for technology and IT support. We render a strong understanding in cybersecurity and cloud management; all utilizing the latest technology to provide excellent value for our clients. We are also ISO 27001 and 9001 certified and GDPR-compliant, so your company and client’s data are safe

We can build you a great team of:

1. Cybersecurity Specialist
2. Threat Intelligence Analyst 
3. System Administrator
4. AWS and Azure DevOps Engineer
5. IT Technical Assistant
6. Information Technology Team
7. IT Operation Analyst
8. IT Operation Engineer

All the while ensuring Key Performance Indicators:

• high level and timely resolution of IT support and services
• great customer and client satisfaction rating

Key benefits of Infinit-O partnership:

• Cost Reduction

Expect high quality & productivity with a 70% saving on operational costs.

• Scalability

As your business demands shift, so can your Infinit-O team.

• Access to Excellent Talent

Our world-class “A+ Recruiting” process attracts world-class talent.

• Operational Excellence

Collaborative Service Level Agreement, metrics-intensive performance, and open communication.

• Trusted Partnership

Have confidence with our >97% client retention rate.

Let’s work together in Building a Great Cybersecurity and Cloud Management Team who can duly respond with the expanding IT needs.

Start small. Exceed expectations. Think infinitely. Think Infinit-O.