It’s no great surprise that our houses and lives are increasingly connected, in my lounge alone I run an Ethernet switch with 6 devices connected to it. Recently I had to install a new Wireless router and with a new wireless key and update all of my wireless devices so I could use Norton DNS. After updating two Internet radios, a Wii, four smart phones, two PCs and four laptops, I vowed never to do it again!
I have to confess, I was genuinely surprised at how many connected devices had pervaded our house. Things had changed slowly and each small addition hadn’t really been noticed.
I often see a similar approach with many of our cloud customers. I was recently with a customer who has been with us for a number of years and yet confessed that they hadn’t logged on to their portal for months. The assumption was that their solution was just working and they had no need to change anything.
Cloud solutions bring fantastic benefits with regards to taking much of the responsibility for hardware and software out of customer’s hands. Yet, this is a real issue with cloud solutions; a perception that the services that have been purchased are somehow static without ongoing improvements. But nothing could be further from the truth. For companies like Symantec.cloud, the portal and the technologies and interfaces behind it are undergoing constant improvement. Many of these are invisible to the user, such as hardware enhancements or increased availability.
In many cases however, changes are very visible and significantly improve the user experience. Consider Symantec.cloud’s ClientNet portal. In the last year alone there have been improvements to reporting, visibility of data via dashboards and the ability to customise many aspects of the solution. Often it can be an unfortunate case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and customers simply don’t know the changes are taking place.
It was a great opportunity with the customer I mentioned earlier to be able to get them to log on to their portal and appreciate just how much things had changed. They were able to schedule a series of regular reports on different topics, they now know that they can log support issues quickly and easily via the portal and they were impressed with the richness of the dashboards that are presented at log in.
If you have a cloud solution and you haven’t logged on to your portal in a while because it’s just doing its job, log in and see what’s changed. You may find it could be doing an even better job and you might be missing out.