Predictions continue to come for how long it will be before the majority of organizations make their move to the cloud, but business owners continue to question the necessity of cloud services in their organization. They question the cloud even though some don’t realize that they use it in their everyday lives. It’s hard to adopt something that you don’t understand. In order to really understand what cloud services are and how they can work for your organization, you have to see them applied to other organization’s workflows and understand how they’re working for them. In this blog we’ll uncover a little bit more on what other organizations that have moved to the cloud are using it for and how the cloud can optimize company efficiency.
Mobility
This is, perhaps, one of the biggest draws of the cloud. When you host your line of business applications and servers in the cloud, it means that your employees working from the road or remotely aren’t subject to your internal server speed and internet connectivity to access it and can, instead, access it from anywhere at any time with a reliable internet connection.
An example? Bill is working from his hotel room at a conference 1000 miles away from the main office. If his organization isn’t hosted in the cloud he can remote into the server or his workstation. This is great, until a big storm comes and the power goes out at the office location, taking down the server and eliminating his connectivity. Or, say the power doesn’t go out, but the internet is being worked on and the server isn’t accessible. These types of situations don’t happen with the cloud. Most providers offering cloud solutions guarantee 99% or better uptime. That’s huge, particularly when you have inefficient or unreliable internal IT staff that may or may not be able to get you back up. And the users back at the office can connect via backup lines that are always part of any sound cloud strategy.
Now, as far as efficiency is concerned (since that’s what we’re really discussing here), just imagine if Bill doesn’t have to wait on connectivity to be established in the office. Bill can work from the road, he can work in the middle of the night, he can work at his conference 1000 miles away. Bill can work from literally anywhere. This immediate access to information can allow him to deliver proposals on the go, discuss company data with his team from his conference or work while he’s eating dinner at a restaurant with a wifi connection. This means that issues get handled live and there is no waiting until he can get back to the office. It doesn’t get more efficient than that.
Multi-Site Expansion 10,000x easier.
Every growing company experiences issues as they attempt to understand the best way to service their users. As an organization adds additional locations, those sites have to be able to access the same database and applications as the other locations and headquarters. Now, when you host your data internally, the data lives on a server and users inside and out are reliant on an internet connection at your headquarters. That same internet connection is typically being used by the tens or hundreds of users that are at that location and working remotely. In a high traffic time period, this can quickly result in the internet line being used up, resulting in a slower server and longer wait time for other employees at new locations to be able to access that information from your server.
Rather than worrying about outages that take every location down, or network slowness that handicaps your users, the cloud can provide your organization with a secure connection that is much faster than what’s available at your office, particularly during high traffic times.
How does this make your organization more efficient? Have you ever been on hold with customer support or in line at a retail location and had to stand there waiting for their “slow system” or a reboot? Multiply those ticking seconds by the number of employees you have in your organization. Now multiply the total number of seconds you just calculated with your payroll expenses. See how the cloud could offer you a lot in the way of efficiency?
These are just two examples. There are literally hundreds of ways that the cloud is helping organizations become more efficient every day. That’s why it’s so popular. In technology there are trends and then there are game-changing breakthrough solutions. That’s what the cloud is. While it can be difficult to change something that appears to be working just fine, the reality is that you could have a much more predictable cost with a more reliable connection without worrying about hardware failures and upgrades.
It’s time to seriously consider switching to the cloud.
