Why Your Business Should get on the Cloud

Most small businesses as well as most large businesses, all do their computing on the cloud these days, and for good reason. It’s flexible, it’s fast, it’s secure, and it allows you access to other applications on the cloud, that you wouldn’t have in-house normally. In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that computing on the cloud is fast becoming the norm for all business today, and if you still need a reason to migrate your business to the cloud, several of the best reasons for doing so are listed below.

Automatic Software Updates

One of the great things about cloud computing is that all servers are performed out of sight and off the premises. Your provider of cloud services handles all the maintenance and repair work necessary for servers, so that you don’t ever have to be involved. The same thing is true for updates to software such as security patches, which is another thing you don’t have to be bothered with. Because this is taken care of for you, you and your employees are free to concentrate on activities more central to your business.

Flexibility

If your company is one that has been steadily experiencing growth, you will undoubtedly be going through regular increases in bandwidth demand as your computing needs increase. If you were managing that in-house, you would probably have difficulty scaling up every time your business experienced a growth spurt, but thanks to the inherent scalability of cloud computing, it’s not something you need to worry about. Of course, it works the same way in reverse, and if you should need to scale down due to a downturn in business, the flexibility provided by cloud computing can accommodate that as well.

Greater Collaboration

Your in-house teams can be much more effective and much more productive when they can edit and share documents wherever they happen to be, using any kind of device. There are all kinds of cloud-based sharing apps and workflows which allow users to make real-time updates, and which provide each user with full access to documents as needed. When your company employees can do things together, they can do it better as well, and that means your company benefits.

Disaster Recovery

Even the smallest-sized businesses can now participate in disaster recovery programs, simply by positioning their business on the cloud and taken advantage of disaster recovery services offered by your provider. In fact, statistics show that small sized businesses are twice as likely to have implemented regular backup procedures on the cloud, as well as recovery procedures. Both these processes being in place will help small businesses avoid disaster, should business-critical data be compromised or corrupted in some way.

No Capital Expenditures

Cloud computing avoids the need to make large expenditures for computer equipment and network infrastructure, that would ordinarily be required for an on-the-premises setup for computing. Using the pay-as-you-go model for cloud computing, a subscription fee which is paid either annually or monthly is virtually the only cost associated with your computing. To extend this concept, you also don’t have to worry about periodically replacing that high-priced hardware equipment to keep it current and functioning optimally. All that is transparent to you, and is taken care of by your cloud services provider.

Security

Losing a laptop machine has surprisingly become a billion-dollar enterprise in this country, and even worse than losing the machine itself, would be the security nightmare presented by losing company data contained on it. Cloud computing provides a hedge against this kind of scenario, since data would be stored on cloud servers rather than in the local environment. In addition, once you know you’ve lost your laptop for sure, the data on it can be remotely erased, so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Working from Anywhere

As long as you have an Internet connection, you can literally work from anywhere. Since virtually all cloud services also provide the capability for you to work with mobile apps, you’re also not restricted to using any specific kind of device. This allows cloud-connected companies to offer perks to their employees such as working from home, to create a better work-life balance, with no loss of productivity. Studies have shown that a majority of workers would sacrifice income for the ability to work from home, so this is a major perk which could be provided.

Staying Competitive

Moving to the cloud will provide you with world-class technology, which you can put to use to stay competitive with your rivals. It also levels the playing field between smaller businesses and the giant corporate concerns, since everyone has access to the same technology. If there’s only one move you could make to become more competitive, migrating your business to the cloud should be that one move.

Document Control

In the past, collaboration between employees often got to become somewhat nightmarish in execution, with employees sending files back and forth, often in the form of email attachments, so that each could work on a task sequentially. When you migrate your business to the cloud, files are centrally stored and managed, so that everyone sees a single version of the most current file. This increased visibility fosters much better collaboration, and that in turn impacts productivity, and the bottom line for your company.