Virtual Office
Table of contents
- What is the Virtual Office?
- How can the Virtual Office be applied to your specific company?
- The environmental benefits
- The financial benefits
- Other benefits
- Involved technologies
What is the Virtual Office?
The virtual office is our favourite service. It is a combination of several IT technologies that allow a company to operate efficiently and seamlessly without any actual office space. Instead, all the company' employees can work from home. With proper planning and implementation, all the employees will appear to be in the same building and in the same computer network.
How can the Virtual Office be applied to your specific company?
Regardless of your business requirements, you can use the Virtual Office concept.
- Your entire company works from home
- Some of your employees could work from home
- Have geographically remote employees be part of your office
- Have travelling staff connect as if in the office
The environmental benefits
The Virtual Office provides so many benefits for the environment.
- no commuting
- reduced or no air conditioning
- reduced power consumption
- less land space
The financial benefits
The Virtual Office also provides you with several cost savings benefits.
- reduced or no office space lease
- reduced electricity bill
- no kitchen or basic office equipment
- no cleaning staff
- reduced risk of staff getting sick
- server virtualization savings
- commuting costs
Other benefits
There are other "hidden" savings that you may not realize.
- staff loyalty - your employees will love working for you and will do whatever they can to help the business succeed
- you can work from home
Involved technologies
VPN - Virtual Private Network
The VPN is the key technology required for a Virtual Office. It is required in order to keep your remote access secure.
You can read more about VPNs at our Virtual Private Networks page.
VoIP - Voice over IP
VoIP will allow your employees to have a local extension on your office phone line as if they were physically in the same building. Their outgoing calls will come from your business number/
You can learn more about VoIP in our Voice over IP page.
Server virtualization
Server virtualization is not required, but it will allow you to run all your servers in fewer physical servers.
If you are not renting office space, you will need to find a place to have your servers. Server virtualization will reduce your costs for hosting your server. You options for you server could include:
- lease small office space
- collocation space
- run the servers in your own home
There are a lot more benefits to server virtualization which you can read about in our server virtualization page.
High speed Internet
Your users will need high speed internet in order to have fast access to your network over the VPN connection as well as to have a phone extension in their home office. This shouldn't be a problem as most users already have high-speed Internet at home.
