What Can the Cloud Do for Your Business?

More Flexibility
In the modern world of business, flexibility is the watchword. The needs of clients and customers are changing all the time, and businesses need to be adaptable enough to adjust. Cloud computing can provide the flexibility that can give you a competitive advantage. With cloud computing, firms can free up resources—including both financial and human resources—for deployment in other areas. This allows them to devote more attention to satisfying clients and customers, rather than managing and maintaining their own IT resources.

Lower Costs
Prior to the advent of cloud computing, many businesses ran their own in-house computing resources. This meant employing IT team members to manage those resources and to ensure sensitive data was kept under lock and key. Needless to say, all this came at a cost. Switching from in-house IT infrastructure to remote servers provided by third-party cloud platforms allows businesses to make potentially significant cost savings.

Better Collaboration
Communication is crucial to success in business, and the cloud has made it a great deal easier to collaborate with colleagues and clients all over the world. The nature of collaboration has also changed a lot over the last decade. It’s more common to work with colleagues in different parts of the world, for example. With cloud computing, colleagues, clients, as well as third-party contractors and consultants can all work in the same files via the cloud. This makes a whole host of processes smoother.

Strong Security
Data security has been one of the hot topics across all industries, with tougher regulations continuing to be introduced in order to ensure robust protection. And still, many companies worry that migrating to the cloud may leave their data less secure. In fact, cloud providers go to great lengths to ensure that data is kept secure. They’re tasked with protecting data from being accessed by unauthorized users, and this is something they do effectively using robust encryption. Cloud providers also usually give individual clients the freedom to determine their own security settings and restrictions.

Reliable Continuity
All kinds of things can put businesses’ IT infrastructure out of action—from power cuts to natural disasters. To avoid disruption and any potential related losses, businesses need to ensure that adequate arrangements are in place to assure reliable continuity, come what may. With cloud computing, all your data is stored in the cloud, which means that you can access it as long as you have an internet connection.

Easier Mobility
In this age of working from anywhere, mobility is paramount. Cloud computing has greatly assisted this trend towards more flexible working. It enables employees to access the files they need, wherever they happen to be, thus allowing them the ability to work when and where they need to. Again, all they need is an internet connection.

Disaster Recovery
One of the problems of being reliant on legacy IT infrastructure is that it’s likely to be more prone to failing. These technical failures can do a good deal of damage to a business, as well as run the risk of irretrievable data loss. Cloud computing ensures that disaster recovery is much easier than it might otherwise be. This is because vital data is stored offsite in third-party data centers, making it easier to retrieve in the event of unscheduled downtime.

Easy Scalability
Cloud computing provides easy scalability, allowing you to upscale and downscale as your circumstances change. And, your cloud provider will handle this for you, leaving you free to do more important things.

Automatic Updates
Businesses that run their own IT infrastructure also have to handle software updates, so that any security vulnerabilities are patched and the technology is up to date. Cloud providers generally take responsibility for this, saving clients time, expense, and energy.