Let Cloud Computing Show You How

On Thursday March 7^th the Indo Canada Chamber of Commerce IT committee organized its first IT event of the year on Cloud Computing.

The event was held at the newly developed Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto.

Speaking at the event Naval Bajaj, President ICCC, emphasized on the need of associating with the chamber and getting benefit from its links with various government and non-government bodies both within Canada and India. 

The chamber has been at the forefront of developing strong Canada-India relations and furthering the understanding between these two nations not only at Federal or Provincial levels but at municipal levels as well.

Bajaj cited the recent tour of India which he took with the Mayors of Brampton and Markham, which was a tremendous success, and the various events that ICCC organized which is nearly one every week.

He mentioned that the chamber has special focus on Small and Medium business and they certainly stand to benefit by participating as members of the Indo Canada Chamber of Commerce. The event itself was focused on Cloud Computing for Small and medium businesses. 

Baskaran Rajamani, Partner, Deloitte was the keynote speaker. Baskaran is a highly regarded and well known authority on cloud computing and risk management. He is part of the leadership team at Deloitte’s Technology & Information Risk Services.

He emphasized on the value of cloud computing for SMBs and challenged the youth and entrepreneurs to launch new businesses as Cloud computing provided innovative and efficient solutions in a fast changing global economy.

He cited many examples where cloud computing was used to cut down on inefficiencies and lower the cost by taking advantage of cheap labour and the time difference between Canada and India.

Baskaran mentioned that the cloud based services like office 365 provided cost effective deployment of enterprise level applications that are most commonly used across organizations without the overhead of infrastructure costs, upfront capital outlay or on human resources.

The Cloud provides a flexible and pay as you go model that can be customized to the changing needs of businesses and therefore has the most to offer for SMBs.

Baskaran’s keynote address was followed by a brief presentation on Office 365 by Jaideep Kala, who is a member of ICCC IT committee. Kala talked about the trends impacting our working lives like mobile computing, social media and the cloud.

He showed the value proposition of Office 365 for small and medium enterprises and how SMBS can benefit from moving to the cloud. Office 365 is Microsoft’s integrated suite of cloud based office applications like Exchange, Office, SharePoint and Lync.

Kala’s presentation was followed by an actual demonstration of the newly released version of office 365 by Ashish Narang who is business development manager at Ingram Micro. Narang demonstrated commonly used scenarios at most businesses and how office 365 helped in managing information, enhancing collaboration and productivity.

The event ended with a note from Mr. Jagdish Bajaj, ICCC Director for events and IT committee who thanked the presenters and the audience for coming and gracing the event.

Jagdish Bajaj cited how in a period of just over a year since he came on board ICCC has saved substantially on its annual IT budget by moving to a cloud based SaaS (Software as a Service) membership management software and Office 365 for its email , communication and collaboration needs.

He emphasised that the cloud based software solutions had a lot to offer SMBs and that he would like to see more SMBs embark on this journey.

The IT committee plans to have at least three more events this year so watch out your mailboxes for upcoming events in the months ahead.