Every business and organization has a responsibility to provide their employees with the tools they need to complete their responsibilities. You might think that it is difficult to get people all the technology they need – especially if you have employees working remotely. But accessing to the latest technology for work is something that IT support companies can help you with easily, and in reality there are lots of easy and affordable ways to make sure employees have the tech they need.

We spoke to a tech provider based in London, called TechQuarters. They are an IT support and managed services company that are partnered with Microsoft. They discussed with us the top ways that a business can provide employees with technology. They said that any of the other top London IT support companies would recommend the same solutions.

BYOD

The odds are that many of your employees already have good technology that they use on a daily basis: Their personal devices. These days a large majority of people own a smartphone, and might even have a tablet or laptop they use for personal things. It can be a great cost saving and flexible solution to allow employees to bring their own device to work. These policies (bring your own device, or BYOD) are very common among businesses around the world. It means you don’t have to purchase smartphones for employees to use for work (which is expensive). The challenge is making sure that the business’ data is protected while it is on a personal device.

The best solution for this is to employ unified endpoint management. This enables a business to manage any device (endpoint) whether it be smartphone, tablet, computer, or even printers and scanners. This will allow businesses to enroll employee’s personal device so that they can use them for work, and for personal use, and keep everything protected.

Hotdesking

Though many people these days have their own personal technology, it should not be assumed that all of your employees have their own computer to work on. They might be relying on their employer to provide technology for them.

One way of providing everyone in the business with technology, whilst managing costs, is to implement hotdesking. This is where employers, or users in general, share a workspace and the tech that is at the workspace (such as a desktop PC, keyboard & mouse, headset, etc.) This is a solution that is very fitting with the current trend of hybrid working. Many employees are choosing to spend some time working from home, and the rest of the time working from the company’s office.

Imagine 2 employees have their own devices that they can use to work from home, and one employee relies on office supplies. With hotdesking, the employee that relies on using company technology can share two desks with their hybrid-working colleagues. With modern software licensing and tools like Active Directory from Microsoft, users can access their company profile from multiple machines, meaning hotdesking is a viable way of sharing technology.

Cloud Storage

Hardware technology is one thing when onboarding employees, but software is also an important consideration. Luckily, with Cloud Services and Storage, this is not a difficult challenge.

The Cloud enables users to access their data and apps from any device that is connected to the internet. For instance, a user might have been assigned a license for Microsoft 365 by their work. Microsoft 365 is fully Cloud-based, meaning the user can access all the apps included in the service via a web browser, or use the desktop app, or even use the mobile apps. What is more, the Cloud storage included with Microsoft 365 (OneDrive and SharePoint) would also mean that the user could access their files and documents from anywhere with internet access.

Desktop as a Service

Following on from the previous point, the Cloud has enabled us to create fully desktop experiences (like Windows 10 or 11) that can be stream over the internet. This means that users don’t even need to have any apps installed on their computer. They just connected to the Cloud and stream a work desktop, complete with applications, to their PC. Services like this include Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. For businesses that work with remote employees or freelancers, this can be an excellent way of provision them with the applications and software they need to do their work.