The cloud offers companies everything they need to stay competitive in business: fast computing, expandable storage, reliable system backup, and more. It also offers substantial cost savings, greater work flexibility, and scalability. What’s more, Forrester’s well-respected cloud service forecast has this to say: Spending on cloud services will increase by 30% in the next few years.
Despite numerous incentives, some enterprises are still skeptical about the system, so let's take a look at the tangible, unexpected cloud benefits that can help them, and your business, maintain constant growth.
1. Fast data migration
Enterprises maintaining large volumes of data usually transfer them from one system to another under various circumstances: when replacing old storage systems, when upgrading an entire IT infrastructure, when merging with another company, or when relocating.
Ideally, migrating business data should be smooth, fast, and secure…as it is with the cloud. It makes the process go quickly and significantly reduces the potential for data loss and/or corruption, transfer delays, and breaches.
2. Decluttered office
Because the cloud lets you access everything from the internet -- programs, applications, data -- there’s less need for on-premises servers and other hardware. The advantage to your business, however, goes beyond solving space constraints; it also makes office management easier, which ultimately leads to reduced overhead.
The cloud minimizes your investments on expensive hardware, allowing you to pare down your IT resources to just the bare essentials. Similarly, growing businesses that need to increase their capacity may easily do so with pay-per-use cloud solutions like Cloud Enabled Office, which offer SMEs scalable cloud options.
3. Automatically updated software
Business owners are generally not too keen on spending time updating their operating systems and applications, which is why updating software or installing security patches are often neglected. Cyber criminals are relentless in targeting exploitable vulnerabilities, so relegating this to your list of secondary tasks puts your systems at risk.
In a cloud-hosted setup, the service providers handle all the necessary software maintenance and diligently perform security updates. Furthermore, being on the cloud gives you access to third-party expertise without having to deal with nitty-gritty updates and security patches.
4. Increased security
Cloud security reports have dispelled the notion a cloud infrastructure is not as secure as a traditional IT setup. Gartner even reports that security for many cloud providers is better than its traditional counterpart.
And although a disaster recovery plan is indispensable to every business’s IT strategy, the cloud reduces the need for it. For instance, if your company suffers a security breach or is hit by some kind of natural disaster, your data will still be accessible in the cloud and retrieving it will be a simple task.
5. Competitive edge
With faster and more efficient processes, seamless application updates, a decluttered office, and a more secure IT environment, your company spends little precious time worrying about technology. To stay competitive, SMEs should leverage these benefits to ultimately afford them more time and resources to make strategic business decisions.
What we’ve listed here barely covers the benefits of a Cloud Enabled Office. Other than saving your business lots of money, allowing your employees to work more productively, and keeping your data more secure, Fluid Networks’ cloud engineers can help design a cloud strategy for your business’s particular needs. If you need these and other incomparable benefits of the cloud, get in touch with us today.