This is the seventh article in a seven-part series outlining best-practices and advice for leveraging mobile apps for your business. To read part six, click here.

In today’s technology-driven, cloud-enabled world, the vast majority of businesses rely on internet connectivity for a growing array of critical business needs. From developing and deploying mobile apps to digital marketing campaigns to better customer service and faster order fulfillment, fast, reliable, scalable bandwidth is the foundation on which many business processes rest. For CRS Technology Consultants, an IT consulting firm based in southwest Florida and serving customers nationwide, that means Comcast Business Internet.

With company headquarters located in Florida’s “Hurricane Alley,” CRS’s physical business is at risk from severe weather events for roughly half of every year. In a Comcast Business case study, its founders recognized the emergence of cloud- based services as a unique opportunity to help mitigate that risk by reducing its reliance on on-premises hardware and moving systems to the cloud.1 Along with greater assurance of business continuity in the event of weather-related outages, the company also stood to benefit from cost and efficiency gains resulting from cloud services.

As CRS moved more line-of-business applications to the cloud, the need for a faster, more-scalable connection to support timely access to those applications by both employees and customers became starkly apparent. Already a user of Comcast Business Internet, the company simply contacted its local sales rep and upgraded its connection to 100 Mbps. Comcast was able to add capacity quickly, without having to install new equipment or schedule a site visit. The increased bandwidth and cloud-based applications available throughout the organization help CRS ensure that everyone has central access to the same information without having to hunt it down.

“Now if we have an issue that goes on for several days or involves multiple engineers, it’s all being worked from one ticket, one central space,” says Jordi Tejero, the company owner. “Everybody has access to that. Even if it saves every employee just 10 minutes a day, the numbers add up really quickly.”

Robust broadband connectivity to support cloud-based software is also increasing productivity at CRS by limiting the amount of time its professionals have to spend on-site at clients’ facilities. They are now able to do a significant amount of work remotely by leveraging applications such as a cloud-based remote monitoring and management tool that allows them to monitor clients’ networks and connected devices. “If one of their workstations has, say, a bad block on its hard drive or a server seems about to fail, the system alerts us, and we can run diagnostics and repairs remotely,” Tejero explains.

For Tejero, the most important thing about the cloud-based capabilities 100 Mbps Comcast Business Internet enables is that they liberate his clients from worry and free them to focus on their own businesses’ core competencies. “Working in the cloud has freed us up to help our clients move their business forward,” he says. “Instead of having to spend money on fixing stuff, they are able to spend those dollars on truly forward-looking IT initiatives, such as mobile apps, that can help grow their business.”

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