As ‘The Beast from the East’ hit the UK hard last week, the weather forced hundreds of schools, offices, and motorways to shut with temperatures plummeting to -10 degrees across England and Scotland. Public transport also took a major hit with buses and train journeys cancelled all over the UK, contributing to the disruption of work for most Britons.

Some of our clients had to close their offices completely and had staff unable to make the journey to work or with school closures needed to stay at home with with their children. Using G Suite and the power of Cloud computing has enabled work to continue from home and colleagues to collaborate in Hangouts and Docs, retain access to vital information in Gmail and Drive and minimised the impact of the disruption to business.

Our offices are located in Newcastle city centre. Due to the extreme snowy conditions many of our staff couldn’t get in to work because of transport issues and delays. Not wanting to expose our staff to risky journeys we declared a snow day and closed the office. Thanks to GSuite and our SaaS infrastructure everyone is able to productively work from home keeping the business and customers happy
Ryan Green, Managing Director of Pebble

Steve Adams, Refractiv’s Senior G Suite consultant said, “it’s actually been a nice example of business resilience to an unplanned event. Beyond an event like this it may help small businesses think about their resilience to other disruptions and their disaster readiness. As our clients have proved, with G Suite so long as you can get online from somewhere, business keeps going”.

 

About Refractiv

Refractiv is a Google Cloud & Google for Education Partner, providing deployment, migration and training services and a range of complementary cloud products.

The company has extensive experience in developing products and also designs, develops and supports custom solutions for business in cloud, web and mobile.

OverDRIVE is designed for organisations using G Suite. OverDRIVE lets you make great-looking and powerful workspaces and sites, transforming Drive and other G Suite content into web pages automatically. No specialist skills are needed so you can set up a site in minutes. Uses include project workspaces, sites, intranets, digital libraries, event sites and education resources. OverDRIVE is available globally online and through partners.