As technology advances, so does the way businesses operate. Long gone are the days of paper notebooks, letters, and faxes! Instead, technology has revolutionized the way almost all businesses work with computers, the internet, email, and more.
Technology keeps advancing at such a rate that sometimes it can be hard to keep up. The latest wave taking the industry by storm? Cloud computing. Whether you’ve heard of it or not, this article will help dive deeper into cloud computing and explain some of the top reasons that so many people have adopted it.
What Is Cloud Computing?
In the past, companies adopting technology had to develop their own computer networks, which were often very costly. Not only does a business need computers for all its staff, but it also needs data centers, large IT teams, and miles of cabling to link everything together. Cloud computing is quickly changing this.
Cloud computing offers on-demand IT services such as data storage, communication, and computing power remotely. Meaning that instead of building a huge computer network for your own business, you can simply pay to use a remote service instead. These systems have taken computing for business to a new level.
1. Safe, Secure Storage
One of the biggest draws of cloud computing is the mass data storage it can offer. As mentioned, creating a huge data center in your own office is a huge challenge, requiring heaps of IT expertise and knowledge. Cloud-based storage solutions offer a suitable alternative.
With cloud storage, your data is safe and protected. As the team from BackBlaze.com say on their site, you can “store safely to the cloud, including safeguarding data.” It’s more than just a convenient place to store data and save on office space. You can rest assured that your data is encrypted, backed up, and protected at all times, offering more security and peace of mind when it comes to important business information.
That’s not all. Cloud storage helps to prevent catastrophic losses in data. In the past, many companies have experienced crisis scenarios where a server has gone down, causing them to lose months or even years’ worth of work. With cloud storage, this can be avoided. Your chosen cloud provider will secure and backup your data, ensuring that there is no need for disaster recovery scenarios.
2. Saving Money
Safety, security, and ease of storage are all up there with the top reasons that people opt for cloud computing services. If there was a second place, it has to be financial. The amount of money saved by cloud computing is tremendous when compared with the cost of building, running, and maintaining your own mass IT infrastructure within a building or corporation.
Cloud services work on a subscription model; you will pay more as you require more services or more storage. The price you would pay monthly for an IT department to build and maintain the same amount of storage would be huge in comparison. The cloud team will be working 24/7 on maintenance and upkeep of the networks, something that an in-house IT department could not do – without a huge spend!
3. Flexible Working
In this day and age, flexible working has become one of the most important offerings for staff and businesses alike. With more people than ever working from home, there is an actual need for cloud computing. With these online services, you can share data, intranets, email, and collaborative working features from a secured cloud location. This allows you and your staff to work from anywhere in the world, with no risk of data leaks or breaches. The Covid-19 pandemic has driven even more people to look into these sorts of solutions, making cloud computing even more popular than ever before.
4. Scaleable Features
Finally, as mentioned, these cloud services are usually subscription model services. This means that, on a basic level, you could just pay for some online storage. Easy enough – and relatively cheap. However, as your business grows you may need more services. Central email, databases, analysis, computing power, or just about any other IT service you can think of. All of this can be easily added to your contract and scaled up. This makes growing a company far easier than having to manage all these things in-house.
These are just four of the top reasons companies opt for cloud computing more often than not nowadays. There are some other tremendous features for more specific business needs. However, any company can benefit from the reasons listed. Cloud computing is not just a new wave, it’s here to stay.
