In the second part of this series, we will be discussing the advantages of the cloud and how it benefits your business. Last time, we looked at the cloud in detail and explored exactly what it is and how it works. We talked about how cloud computing is a mechanism for sharing and storing data via the internet. It is typically sold using three service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – and they can be public, private or hybrid. We shall now discuss in detail how the cloud can enhance your business.
What are the benefits of migrating to the cloud?
Cost
Establishing, running and maintaining physical data centres can be expensive and time consuming. Your hardware begins to age as soon as you’ve purchased it and eventually it needs replacing. The cloud eliminates the need for on-site data centres, thereby reducing your infrastructure overhead. The cost of the cloud includes upgrades, support and maintenance and you pay only for services procured. It is paid for on a subscription basis with a relatively low monthly cost, which can change depending on your requirements; cloud providers charge based on usage, so you can choose a package which suits your business. This has the benefit of being cash-flow friendly as you do not have to budget for large, one-off payments in case of hardware failure. Finally, the reliability of the cloud means that failures and downtime are less likely to occur. Less downtime means less profit loss and more time to be productive.
Accessibility
As we established in the first article, the cloud allows you to store, share and access data via the internet. Moving your business to the cloud therefore gives you a huge amount of flexibility. Your employees can work from virtually any location; your employees could be stationed all over the world in different time zones and your business could run 24/7 through the cloud. Employees can enjoy a work-life balance as they can work flexible hours from home. Indeed, you can reduce business overheads by having fewer workstations in the office and allowing employees to work from home more frequently. Using the cloud hugely increases productivity as employees have access to the business network all the time, from anywhere.
Scalability
Cloud-based services are a good choice for businesses who expect continuous growth or who undergo fluctuations in demand. Traditionally, to prepare for unexpected growth, a business would have additional servers and licences which may have sat around unused for years. Furthermore, short term flexibility was also an issue for industries with fluctuating demand: it can be difficult to boost your server load to cope with the heavy traffic. With the cloud, however, there is no need to plan for unexpected growth; you can upgrade your package in minutes. If you only need a temporary bandwidth increase, you can scale down again, paying only for what you’ve used. Therefore, when your business experiences growth (or if it unfortunately goes the other way), the cloud will support you at a proportionate cost.
In the following weeks we shall continue exploring the benefits of migrating to the cloud in depth. We will be discussing benefits such as security, reliability, control, collaboration and competition.
If your business is ready to migrate to the cloud, call us on +44 203 034 2244 or +1 323 984 8908. Alternately, you can contact us online. We will be happy to help you overcome your IT challenges. We have engineering bases in the United Kingdom, Europe and Southern California and our group of highly experienced engineers are available 24/7 to assist and ensure your business’ IT infrastructure is running seamlessly.
You must be logged in to post a comment.