While accessing services online isn’t new, the rate at which businesses are turning to the cloud is growing faster than ever before. This has reshaped business models, saved companies money, and improved their efficiency too. Of course, these are only a few of the benefits when it comes to the way that cloud computing transforms those businesses that implement it. As a business owner, you may want to delve in and look at these benefits for yourself.
Lowering the Total Cost of Business Ownership
Cloud costs also keep your overhead lean since your service provider incurs all the costs, not you. This is great because the cost of housing everything internally adds up fast. General maintenance and upkeep coupled with hosting your data on your own servers is an entire project in itself – one you probably don’t have room for in your budget. These are barriers the cloud removes while still letting you build the infrastructure you need. This makes it faster for you to produce work and also allows you to be more innovative, which means you’ll flourish.
Wise Step says it’s also great that everyone can now operate from the same current information as long as you give them access privileges. This means you don’t have to worry about losing time because you couldn’t respond to phone calls or emails right away. You also won’t spend all your time creating progress reports or traveling.
One of the chief advantages is it’s cost-effective because you won’t have to make such a large investment in your own infrastructure. You also won’t have to invest in IT staff. The cloud provider is responsible for deploying, managing, and upgrading your systems instead. You also don’t have to worry about investing in hardware that will become obsolete in a few years. This environment enables your business to be more agile and innovative with lower financial risk. When you do this from the very beginning you’ll free up more operating capital.
Focusing on Business, not Infrastructure
Instead of developing and expanding your in-house IT infrastructure, now you can simply buy infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from your provider. You can use the cloud to perform all your necessary duties without needing to build your own infrastructure. Since you’re saving so much money and becoming more efficient, you’re also moving faster and innovating more effectively. All of this is very cost-effective.
Since cloud services also support cross-platform APIs, it’s easier for you to integrate various partner systems. Independent businesses of all sizes reduce their infrastructure costs by integrating with a much more powerful and reliable third-party infrastructure.
Enabling a Mobile Workforce
When your entire workforce is connected with a small business phone system they can work from any location. This means you can rest assured that they’re accomplishing work and addressing issues even while away from your office. It also enables all your team members to have access to the same cloud-based files and applications that their in-house colleagues are using while enjoying the freedom of working on their own terms. This is a great way to transform travel delays into work opportunities as well.
Business 2 Community says the cloud has made remote working exponentially easier, but it has also required a different level of commitment to work responsibilities. At the same time, the growth of cloud computing is also helping to stimulate entrepreneurship. This is because now that employees are using their own devices, companies can benefit from a decrease in the cost of infrastructure. This is especially true if you’re willing to experiment with an entirely remote workforce.
By taking advantage of cloud-based services that you can seamlessly integrate into your business via APIs, your company will greatly benefit. This is especially true for software as a service (SaaS) companies. They find that since they can scale these services to fit their needs, it’s less expensive and easier to expand their services as they grow.
Storage and Security
Ring Central says that with businesses readily adopting cloud-based services, security is paramount. Fortunately, cloud services are starting to improve their safety record. This is good news considering how convenient the cloud is to use today.
In the past, cloud computing was associated with heightened exposure to cyber criminals. Today, this is no longer so. In fact, the cloud now provides a more secure form of storage than on-site company servers. A Right Scale survey found that most businesses understand this and thus security is no longer one of their top concerns. This is because cloud service companies have worked hard to accommodate big companies. Cloud services are continually upgrading their security measures to meet new demands as well. They want to make sure that things like the Sony hack never happen again.
Today, online data storage offers many options in hardware including extensive data caching and fast solid-state drives. You now have access to top quality hardware that’s expertly configured for you. Although every company has different staffing and software needs, having a robust third-party platform in place offers you (along with your employees and customers) faster access to your data than you’d get with local storage. Authentication and logging also occur on these remote servers, which reduces the load that’s placed on your local networks. All this equates to you and your staff getting a lot more done even faster than before without worrying about security, which is why companies throughout the world rely on the cloud daily. The cloud truly has become integrated in our working lives today.
Simply put, company data is more accessible and secure because the cloud stores information across a distributed network instead of on a single physical device. Cloud providers take extra precautions to make sure your data is protected by the latest developments in firewalls and anti-malware. Their IT staff continually monitors the system for intrusions, making data breaches improbable. They also enforce restricted user privileges and encrypted passwords so only authorized persons are able to access any files your company has. With all these things in place you never have to worry about any memory or bandwidth limitations.
