As more and more of the day to day activity of modern businesses take place online the computing power required soon outstrips the resources available to all but the largest organizations.
Cloud computing was once the unknown frontier of bleeding edge computing. However, the last few years have seen the market mature into a reliable staple of a modern enterprise computing.
In this article we’re going to go over a few of the key benefits to moving your IT infrastructure from on-premises systems to a cloud-based environment.
1. Save Space
Real estate isn’t cheap, and servers aren’t small. Cloud providers’ servers are housed in large data centers all over the world. By moving your infrastructure off-site and into a cloud environment you save the space and energy costs of running your own servers. The cost of IT support in New York or other large cities where office space comes at a premium can be greatly reduced by keeping as few elements on premises as possible.
2. Scalable
Because the costs of running a cloud network is spread across all its customers, the cost to increase capacity is far lower than it would be for an in-house IT department. Businesses can easily scale up to scale down their cloud service depending on their requirements. This is particularly useful for businesses which are seasonal, as they can scale their cloud systems back during the quieter periods of the year rather than maintain a server year-round just to use it during their two busiest months.
3. Cost
Because all the elements of your infrastructure are provided by the cloud vendor, you can save large amounts of money that would have been spent buying specialized software and hardware for your business alone. Backup, storage, hypervisor and much more is provided by one supplier at a significant discount.
4. Security
Cloud providers can offer security features that would simply be impossible to deliver in a non-cloud environment. A key part of this is the so-called “Network Effect”. Much like the concept of herd immunity from vaccinations, if a cloud provider has 100,00 customers and 1 of those customers detects an attempt to breach their systems, the knowledge of that attack and how to prevent it and any relevant updates are deployed to all the providers customers.
5. Reduce Your IT Support Costs
As costs like maintenance are covered by your cloud provider and there will be far less hardware on your premises, you can significantly reduce the cost of your IT support.
6. Reduce Downtime
Cloud networks are self-healing, meaning that is a server or even a data center goes down the network will automatically route data to the nearest backup. This results in little to no downtime (some vendors guarantee as little as 0.01%). Compare this to what would happen if a power surge took out your on-premises servers, it could take days or even weeks to replace in-house equipment.
7. Increase Productivity
Cloud computing offers access to tools and computing power that would be unachievable by traditional IT systems. This computing power can help you have the edge on the competition, particularly for organizations that deal with large amounts of data.
We hope this brief guide has shown you some of the benefits that moving your business to the cloud can provide. Obviously, there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to IT and the cloud will not be suited for every company. Cloud is quickly becoming the default IT setup for many start-ups and companies which don’t move with the times will quickly find themselves being outpaced by bolder and more tech- savvy competitors.
We would recommend giving cloud computing some serious consideration and speaking to either your IT department or your managed service provider about how this could be facilitated.
