Exciting Ways to Celebrate Diwali in Office

Diwali, the festival of lights is approaching near and you must be thinking of having a good time celebrating with your boss and colleagues in the office before joining your family, friends and neighbors for the gala later. This sure is the time to illuminate your office with lamps, lights and vibrant colors to spread positive energy and joy all around.

Your enthusiasm should reflect in how you dress, greet people and participate in decoration work and other preparations. Here are some exclusive ideas you can suggest and execute with colleagues, for not every day you’ll get to celebrate the conquest of good over evil!

Auspicious Colors of Rangoli 

Colorful rangolis have been a time-tested way to intensify the significance of this festival, and are still relevant. This Diwali, you can put forth the idea of beginning with making colorful rangolis to beautify your office in a traditional way.

Learn some new and easy-to-practice designs and include others to make the occasion equally special for all. Floral rangolis with multi-color art will be fine enough to become the center of attraction. You can also give ready made wooden rangolis a try as they’re becoming highly popular now.

Themed Clothing

Another creative idea that fits the occasion well will be themed clothing for all. You can, for instance, ask men to come in traditional kurta pajama and women to wear saris. This will in a way symbolize the belief of ‘unity in diversity’ at your workplace. If not every day, you can somehow honor the culture of the country where this festival originated and is celebrated with great enthusiasm by people of different faiths and cultures.

Cultural Activities

Organize a cultural function wherein all employees would willingly participate. Most businesses spend too much on musicians and singers for just a short performance, but you can instead ask everybody to participate by choosing to sing, dance or perform a variety of other activities. There is no need to give it a professional touch, for all you need is to have ‘fun’ by ensuring the engagement of each and everyone.

Street-food Party

Diwali is the festival of exchanging sweets and gifts, helping you to make workplace relationships sweeter & stronger. It would doubtless be a fantastic idea to arrange a small banquet party! You can arrange economical food caterers to set up small food stalls within the office.

You need not think too much about what food items to include, because street foods like paanipuri, chaat, tikki, vada pao and namkeen interest almost everyone. Also, it would be a refreshing idea to spend some time playing fun games after the street food party!

Lakshmi Pooja

No Diwali celebrations can be complete without Lakshmi Pooja, be it your office or home. In fact, Lakshmi Pooja is truly important when you are celebrating Diwali in your office. So, arrange a small Pooja for the well-being of all the employees, and peace and prosperity in the office.

Get a small idol of the Goddess Lakshmi, gently place it on the Swastika symbol and take everybody along to worship it with incense sticks, fresh flowers, rice grains and kumkum.

Happy Diwali! May your business flourish this year. 

Why SMBs Need Reliable & Quick Response IT Support

Taking IT lightly as a secondary concern often proves to be dangerous for small business owners. Some of them even try to take things for granted by seeing IT as an option and not a necessary requirement. In the end, it is with the revenue or opportunities lost that they realize why all other businesses in Singapore have opted to have regular IT support.

In the business world, there are always chances for a crisis like emails going offline and servers crashing. This is when a business owner badly needs quick-response IT support. Though minor issues can be sorted out by the office manager or others, a fully managed IT service is vital when it is about serious damages. Often, business owners are forced to spend unnecessarily on hourly-priced help desk services!

Here is why small businesses should have trustworthy IT support partners:

Dedicated IT Services 

Though there are temporary solutions a business can use to troubleshoot IT problems in the work area, having dedicated IT support permanently today is absolutely necessary. As a small business, you can have a team of expert IT professionals always ready to watch over your company’s network. They are always there to attend you, preventing sudden emergency situations from occurring in future. Dedicated IT experts help resume work without disturbing your workers and besides, you need not worry about unreasonable costs hourly IT services charge.

Maintain Productivity

Solving big operational issues is complicated; downtime can make your business suffer. However, the scene is totally different when you have dedicated IT experts always around you. They ensure that all your computer systems are in order so that your employees can mind their business. This is how you can maintain the flow of work and stay productive. 

Security

Hackers know that small businesses normally don’t have foolproof security measures. Without having technically sound people around, you just can’t detect vulnerabilities. And if you don’t have quick response IT services (just because you want to save money), even not so advanced internet bots can damage your network or steal away confidential business data. Automated hacking programs will target your business regardless of how small or big it is.

Once your server comes in the range of those randomly generated hacking programs, the damage done will obviously be huge and extensive. So, it should be your priority to stay up to date with latest and reliable security systems. Also, what can add to the problem is that it is almost impossible to know and implement all the trendiest safety measures if you are not a qualified system administrator or network engineer.

Professional Advice

Small businesses who invest in sound IT support services after consulting top IT professionals can prosper more than the others.

Today, there’s cut-throat competition in all business areas and this is the reason investing in reliable quick-response IT services has become a must for all businesses. It is not that easy for just anyone to understand IT solutions for hardware, software and modern techniques such as cloud storage and VoIP phone systems. In that case, either you need to be a qualified IT technician yourself or have certified professionals to assist you. So, don’t hesitate to seek advice from a reputed IT service provider if you really wish to keep up with the latest technological advancements and threats it brings along.

Small Businesses Must Not Ignore the Cloud

Though it is true that we’ve barely begun to understand the idea of cloud computing, studies reveal that over 80 percent of giant companies from across the world are already using cloud computing services and the rest including small businesses will soon go for it in a couple of years! Cloud computing is now a popular concept and companies worldwide are opting for private and public clouds to fulfill their varied IT needs.

Businesses that are new to cloud computing (small businesses, especially) often ask how they can benefit from it and how it is going to save them money. Business owners are also doubtful whether shortcomings are too big to be easily overcome. However, it is to be noted that top brands providing cloud services internationally are Google, Microsoft, Dell and Amazon.com. The startup costs are low and security measures these giant service providers use can’t be doubted like this.

Reasons why small businesses must not ignore the cloud:

Improved Management Style

Management style and policies need to be changed with the advent of cloud computing and its applications. It also changes things for corporate IT and this is why all new technical strategies should be opted for accordingly.

A small business will have to improve its capabilities to operate a cloud computing environment. Since manual processes should be automated in this process, corporate IT experts will need to have excellent vendor management skills. Then alone will they be able to handle multiple virtual components from a variety of cloud vendors. A cloud service provider is often responsible for user experience and this might call for changes in conventional service-level agreements also.

Need of Flexibility

With cloud computing coming into practice, small businesses will get chance to become more flexible. This is necessary because they’ll have to meet their users’ needs in varied conditions. For instance, some users operate through mobile devices from more than one location and need to be provided with more information and easy access.

A company can’t easily do it by staying ‘limited' with resources and without expanding its versatility. With cloud solutions, small business owners would be able to improve business models and consider taking steps to benefit from current product or service usage patterns.

Data and Knowledge Resources

Once into cloud computing, a small business will have to rely on cloud vendors for company data. This can help the business learn to manage customer data by introducing sound data security strategies. And, this is not going to happen without a fail-safe safety policy in place. Also, IT will need to stay updated once the business process of a company is outsourced to a cloud service provider.

Mainstream Presence

Cloud computing can considerably alter the way a small business operates and manages digital data and processes. In the build-up process of cloud computing system, a company needs to take steps intelligently by taking along long-term connotations and best available opportunities. This is exactly when a small business can transform and move into the mainstream. 

Conclusion

To conclude, the cloud comes with more substantial business advantages and less challenges in the long run. What can make the real difference is moving the cloud to the leading position of IT transformation strategy. If nothing, small businesses will definitely get to improve on certain aspects and be consistent with international business standards.