How Cloud Computing Reduces Costs
and Increases Efficiency
Companies of all sizes in all industries are taking advantage of the many benefits of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources.
There are several benefits including:
1. Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.
2. Data Security
One of the major concerns of every business, is the security of its data. Data breaches and other cybercrimes can devastate a company’s revenue, customer loyalty and brand positioning.
Cloud offers many advanced security features that guarantee that data is securely stored and handled.
Cloud storage providers implement baseline protections for their platforms and the data they process, such authentication, access control, and encryption. From there, most enterprises supplement these protections with added security measures of their own to bolster cloud data protection and tighten access to sensitive information in the cloud.
3. Scalability
Different companies have different IT needs — a large enterprise of 1000+ employees will not have the same IT requirements as a start-up. Using the cloud is a great solution because it enables enterprise to efficiently — and quickly — scale up/down their IT resources based on their business demands.
Cloud based solutions are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth needs. If your business demands increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.
This scalability minimizes the risks associated with in-house operational issues and maintenance. You have high-performance resources at your disposal with professional solutions and zero up-front investment. Scalability is probably the greatest advantage of the cloud.
4. Mobility
Cloud computing allows mobile access to corporate data via smartphones and devices, which is a great way to ensure that no one is ever left out of the loop. Staff with busy schedules, or who live a long way away from the corporate office, can use this feature to keep instantly up to date with clients and coworkers.
Resources in the cloud can be easily stored, retrieved, recovered, or processed with just a couple of clicks. Users can get access to their works on-the-go, 24/7, via any devices of their choice, in any corner of the world if you stay connected to the internet. On top of that, all the upgrades and updates are done automatically, off-sight by the service providers. This saves time and team effort in maintaining the systems, tremendously reducing the IT team workloads.
5. Disaster recovery
Data loss is a major concern for all organizations, along with data security. Storing your data in the cloud guarantees that data is always available. Cloud-based services provide quick data recovery for all kinds of emergency scenarios – including natural disasters, security breaches, and power outages.
6. Control
Having control over sensitive data is vital to any company. You never know what can happen if a document gets into the wrong hands, even if it is just the hands of an untrained employee.
Cloud enables your complete visibility and control over your data. You can easily decide which users have what level of access to what data. This gives you control, but it also streamlines work since staff will easily know what documents are assigned to them. It will also increase and ease collaboration. Since one version of the document can be worked on by different people, and there is no need to have copies of the same document in circulation.
7. Speed
Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
8. Performance
The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Cloud computing adoption is on the rise every year as companies recognize cloud computing benefits and see how they impact their production, collaboration, security, and revenue.
By using a cloud-based solution, an enterprise becomes more competitive as they reduce the costs and problems associated with on an on-premises IT infrastructure model.
If you have questions about how you can effectively adopt or optimize the cloud for your business, contact us today.