Modern technology has made the world more interconnected than ever before. And as a result, we no longer have to be physically proximate to our place of work to interact with it and do our jobs.
Thanks to high-speed internet connections and a rapidly evolving job market, the world of work is changing. We’re seeing more and more individuals and businesses shirking traditional employment and operations.
They’re opting for a virtual business environment that is more flexible and less costly. They’re leaving behind the world of the twentieth century, and embracing the world of the twenty-first.
Virtual offices
One of the first dilemmas that new businesses face is whether to spend large sums of money on office space. Having an office serves many important functions.
For one, it means that you can hold business meetings in person. This can be helpful if your company has a large number of directors and you need a private space to discuss your strategy.
But also, offices are a way of saying to your customers, “we are a legitimate company that has its own offices.” It’s an important message and one that’s hard to work around if you’re forever working from home.
The problem, however, is that as a lean startup, you want to keep costs down. And despite all the alleged benefits of having an office, they seem to be outweighed by the cost. You simply don’t need the space.
That’s where virtual offices come in. Virtual offices are often just regular offices in regular office buildings. But there’s a difference. You share the facilities with other businesses.
You pay a small subscription to the company that provides the space and in return, you get access to office facilities. You can’t use them all the time, but they are there for you whenever you need them for client entertainment or board meetings.
What’s more, you can set up your virtual office wherever you want. Companies offer spaces in the central business districts of practically every major city on Earth.
Many choose deliberately prestigious addresses. It allows companies to put the same prestigious addresses on their business cards and marketing materials.
Virtual servers
Virtual servers are valuable, essentially for the same reasons as virtual offices. Startups don’t want to have to pay the full price of owning and maintaining in-house IT equipment. They’d rather another company just took care of all of that for them.
Thus, virtual servers offer several advantages. One, they mean that startups don’t have to take a hit to their capital and shell out on expensive new servers.
Two, they don’t have to have an entire IT department on standby to fix any issues. That’s the responsibility of the server provider. And three, they get to choose how much server capacity they need at any given time.
Rather than maintaining an inventory of server space they never use, they can just ramp up or ramp down their requirements as needed.
Going virtual means that businesses can get back to concentrating on what they do best, while saving a bunch of money in the process.
