Many organizations focus all of their energy on growing the business but fail to adequately prepare for the challenges that business growth can bring. Growing pains are commonly felt in the areas of communication and collaboration, which become even more important with business expansion.

A recent report from Eastern Management Group found that more than half of all surveyed organizations are considering the adoption of a hosted unified communications solution to replace their aging phone system. The top reasons for adoption of Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions focus on popular capabilities such as VoIP, mobility, presence and collaboration tools.

There is near-unanimous agreement among small to midsized businesses (SMBs) that collaboration tools are now essential to operations. In a recent Techaisle survey, 96 percent of SMBs ranked improved collaboration as their second-most important IT priority, just behind cloud.

According to the State of Remote Work report from Buffer, 99 percent of workers would prefer to work remotely at least some of the time until they retire. That’s just about everybody. Another study from FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics found that remote work increased by 44 percent in five years and more than 90 percent in 10 years.