‘Sunshine from a Cloud-y Day’
Moving to the Cloud has real potential benefits for your business, particularly with helping your organisation to stay agile and competitive. The term ‘Cloud’ simply means the software and services that run on the internet instead of locally on your on-site server or computer.
Moving data, applications and other business elements to a Cloud computing environment has helped companies to find alternative ways to cut costs. It also helps to make sure that their data and systems are available to their customers constantly and consistently.
With a new business year just around the corner, let’s unpack some of the reasons why a move to the Cloud could be good for your company.
Advantages of Moving to the Cloud
The opposite of a Cloud computing system involves making use of an on-premises data centre, which is a group of servers that an organisation owns and controls privately.
The delivery of on-demand computing services over the Internet on an as-needed basis allows businesses to rent access to computing services like servers, storage, databases, analytics, networking, software and intelligence, over the Internet.
- Saving space and costs: Moving to Cloud technology enables you to save both space and costs, because you will no longer have to be primarily responsible for your on-site data servers. Instead, you will now pay your Cloud provider(s) to handle the data centre and other resources, rather than hosting the servers in-house on your own.
- Agility: Another reason why companies move to the cloud is agility – the ability to respond to changing needs, getting required results in less time and at a lower cost.
- Scalability: In Cloud computing terms, this refers to the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet changing business demands. Being able to easily and quickly scale an IT solution is something that can have an immediate and far-reaching impact on business. Scaling an environment on-demand was more difficult in the past, as organisations were restricted to the size and processing power of their hardware setup. With the Cloud, this limitation has ceased to exist. The pay-as-you-go model of cloud providers enables you to have the flexibility and the ability to scale up or scale down depending on your business needs.
Security fortification
One of the main concerns business leaders have about cloud computing is transferring vital apps, as well as company and/or customer data, to the cloud. However, major cloud service providers employ strict security, compliance and data protection standards. They dedicate tremendous resources to developing advanced security protocols, and follow strict regulatory and compliance requirements
Business Applications
- Testing and development of products: In traditional methods, a testing and development environment would be time-consuming and expensive – due to the setting up of IT resources and infrastructure – and would need manpower. However, with cloud computing, businesses get scalable and flexible cloud services, which they can use for product development, testing and deployment.
- Ecommerce applications in the Cloud enable users and e-businesses to manage customer data, product data and other operational systems.
- Backup and recovery: Cloud service providers offer safe storage and backup facility for data and resources on the cloud. In a traditional computing system, data backup is a complex problem, and often, in the case of disaster, data can be permanently lost. But with cloud computing, data can be easily recovered, with minimal damage.
Cloud Computing and Data
Cloud Computing allows storage and access to data such as files, images, audio and videos. In this age of big data, storing huge volumes of business data locally requires more and more space and escalating costs. This is where Cloud storage comes into play, where businesses can store and access data using multiple devices. The interface provided is easy to use, convenient, and has the benefits of high speed, scalability, and integrated security.
One of the most important applications of cloud computing is its role in extensive data analysis. The extremely large volume of big data makes it impossible to store using traditional data management systems. Due to the unlimited storage capacity of the cloud, businesses can now store and analyse big data to gain valuable business insights.
Last Reflections
One of the common challenges faced by business leaders is allocating sufficient resources to the research and development of new products and solutions, while still being able to properly manage and secure their organisation’s complex IT infrastructure.
Cloud service providers are responsible for securing and managing IT infrastructure, which frees the organisation from this primary IT responsibility, and allows employees to concentrate their time and energy to other areas.
By freeing up operational responsibilities, Cloud computing thus offers your company significant potential benefits from both a business perspective as well – allowing your organisation to make sunshine from a Cloud-y day…
Contact us at enquiries@braintree.co.za for more information on assisting you and your business with your Cloud journey.
