4 key business benefits of cloud computing
With digital transformation and the rise of the modern workplace, businesses are increasingly moving into the Cloud. Cloud technology can save organisations money, and be more efficient and agile than existing IT solutions. Contrary to popular opinion, it can also be unique and personal – empowering you to take control of your IT, and transform your business.
The main benefit of the Cloud is to reduce and often eliminate the need for servers. Yet there are still a few business functions that benefit from keeping the infrastructure in-house, and supporting it with cloud services. Read on to learn more about the benefits of choosing a third party cloud provider, and how the cloud can complement and enhance your IT.
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Cost effectiveness
When an organisation chooses a third party cloud service provider, that third party will usually take on all responsibility for the cloud servers and service, including server maintenance. This not only frees the organisation from its responsibility for upkeep – including the costs of running and maintaining servers – but also the need to keep staff on to manage this.
Servers are expensive to run, and never more so than in the present day, where energy costs are sky high. They require not only energy to operate, but also climate control to keep them cool and performing at maximum capacity. For large businesses, this can mean building your own data centre – the costs of which are huge, and require expert skills. A third party provider removes all of this, making things simpler and cheaper.
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Increased productivity and collaboration
A cloud environment can empower your workforce to be more productive, as IT issues such as upgrades, hardware failures and backups will be made redundant. A managed cloud solution combined with expert technical help will ensure that your servers are running 24/7 with minimal downtime, and kept secure and up-to-date.
Hosting cloud services such as Microsoft 365 will also allow your employees to collaborate, gaining the ability to sync work documents, make live and simultaneous updates, and communicate instantly in real time. This eliminates the typical confusion about latest file versions, making work easier to organise, and reducing the time spent sifting through email threads for the right version of a file.
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Improved security
In the early days of cloud computing, security was the biggest factor cited by companies who were reluctant to make the move. As cloud computing has evolved, however, its security and stability have gone from strength to strength. Access control, firewalls, routine scanning, backups and other safeguards all mean cloud computing is as strong or stronger than your own local networks.
With security now at the heart of their business, cloud service providers adhere to the most stringent of ISO security standards, with constant monitoring and testing to ensure that any security flaws are fixed, and access is strictly controlled. Heavy investment in security by cloud providers has ensured a secure, resilient data centre infrastructure, benefitting all of their clients.
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Scalable Services
With your cloud infrastructure in place, it becomes very easy to scale up the business on demand, as additional users can be quickly added to any cloud package. The availability of server resources means things like storage space, bandwidth and processing power can easily be scaled up or down according to your needs, without you having to buy or provision new hardware.
A good cloud service provider will have a platform that is flexible, and allows for scalability for cost-effective capacity planning. Whether you opt for a shared hosting, virtual machine or dedicated server hosting, your cloud provider should be able to easily transition you to a new service without any downtime or loss of services – enabling you to experiment with different cloud services, and find the right package for your needs.
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If you are interested in benefiting from the cloud, SotaCloud provides excellent performance with high-availability. Our platform simplifies and centralises management, adds the flexibility of scalability on demand, increases security, and enhances disaster recovery – minimising the need for expensive, dedicated on-site resources. For more information please contact a member of our expert team today.