You Can’t Afford to Miss Out on Cloud Computing

Wondering whether you should move to the cloud? Seeing the endless benefits that the cloud offers – it is a no-brainer!

There has been an acceleration in the service releases by cloud service providers and in the adoption rate of cloud by businesses. To top it – cloud computing services are now available at a fraction of the cost as they were available earlier. This has given a boost to small businesses that could not afford the complex IT infrastructure, owing to its stupendous costs earlier. The field is thus being leveled for small businesses. Result – there is an impressive list of small businesses that have disrupted the market using cloud computing. E.g., Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and hundreds of other small companies.

Cloud is undoubtedly the future these days. It is changing how we do business – changing the way individuals, businesses, and companies conduct themselves and carry out their activities. From the enormous benefits that the cloud offers, here is a list of just a few, important cloud benefits:

1. Greater Scalability

Putting applications in the cloud delivers greater scalability. Cloud services provide you with the ability to scale with the click of a button, or via API calls, or even automatically based on certain thresholds. You can scale the cloud services and can opt to move as slowly or quickly as you want. With the cloud, you can bring in users and scale up your cloud usage as the load increases and likewise can scale down thus controlling extra costs. Cloud infrastructure scales on demand to support your fluctuating workloads.

2. Flexible working

Cloud computing offers the advantage of working from anywhere across the globe if you have an internet connection. You allow your employees and sales network to work from wherever they are, be it from home, an office, a client’s office, a co-working space, or even a café. While using critical cloud services, there is no limitation on the device used – You can access your data from any device. 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

3. Automatic software updates

The beauty of cloud computing is that the servers are off-premise. So, you don’t have to worry about maintaining the servers yourself, as the cloud suppliers take care of the servers and roll out regular software updates.

4. Reducing the Expenditure

Cloud services come with ‘pay as you go’ licensing models, allowing you to access what you need and when you need it. This subscription-based model (pay-as-you-go model) lets you pay only for the services you require, avoiding any upfront costs. What’s great about cloud computing is that you don’t need your hardware as everything is hosted on your cloud provider’s servers. This means savings can be made on the cost of hardware. You get to reduce your operational costs while improving IT processes with cloud computing.

5. Increased collaboration

Cloud is enabling new ways of working together – Your team can be anywhere in the world and still work together. When your teams can access, edit, and share documents anytime, from anywhere, they can do more together and do it better. Cloud-based workflows and file-sharing apps help them make updates in real time and give them full visibility of their collaboration.

6. Document control

Document control is to streamline your processes, allowing you to keep your business secure. Cloud computing allows you to easily pick out which documents can be edited, viewed and shared by which users. Moving to cloud computing has facilitated central file storage. It also allows for real-time collaboration. So, you don’t have 100 versions of the same file floating around, creating a mess of conflicting file content, formats and titles. One copy is a whole lot easier to control. Files are stored centrally, and everyone sees one version of the file.

7. Security

With cloud hosting, your business is protected against hacking, infection and internal data theft. Cloud providers are required to comply with a range of stringent, security regulations in order to protect their customers’ data. This includes the use of robust firewall technology that features intrusion prevention systems and in-flow virus protection. These detect and isolate threats before they reach your server. Cloud providers also perform more regular security audits than you probably would on your local server.

Even if you lose your device, your data is still secure. Because data is in the Cloud, it can be accessed no matter what happens to your physical machinery.

8. High Availability

As you become reliant on technology to run your critical operations, downtime can be disastrous. Server failure can result in companies coming to a complete standstill and getting back online can be a challenging process. A cloud environment is engineered to deliver predictable and consistent performance with guaranteed 100% uptime.

9. Lightning fast performance

Cloud computing offers high-performance servers with technology such as powerful CPUs and super-fast SSD drives. Load balancing is used to route client requests in a way that maximizes speed and capacity utilization. In this way, when servers are busy, the load is distributed so that no single server suffers from performance problems. With so many servers at cloud service providers disposal, a cloud provider can always ensure that performance is consistently optimized.