Cloud computing offers a number of advantages and benefits over traditional physical infrastructure located on site.
Some of these benefits include:
Access Anywhere and On Any Device
Having your infrastructure located in ‘the Cloud’ offers the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world and even on almost any device.
You or your employees could be accessing your systems and data from home, while on the road seeing clients or even another country and this can have considerable benefits for your organisation.
Microsolve and our technology partners can put together a solution that will allow you to work from almost any device including laptops, tablets and even mobile phones.
Reducing Your IT Spend
Cloud based computing can bring a number of cost savings to your business depending on the type of Cloud you implement. For example, moving to a hosted application on the public Cloud removes the need for you to maintain and operate your own servers and to carry the costs of supporting these applications which may lead to reduced capital and staff costs.
The responsibility to upgrade systems and infrastructure also generally moves to the service provider so you pay a monthly cost for the service and no longer need to budget for capital expenditure.
Increased uptime and reliability – because service providers share their equipment across many customers, they are able to have in place more levels of redundancy for systems and for this reason they may provide higher levels of availability than can be achieved with your own systems at a significantly lower cost.
Increased Opportunities for Collaboration
Having your applications and data in ‘the Cloud’ allows increased opportunities for collaboration – employees in different physical offices can easily work together on projects when the data is in ‘the Cloud’.
The opportunity extends to partners and even customers collaborating directly with your staff on projects as you can selectively give them access to Cloud based applications and data.
Scalability
When you are operating and maintaining your own physical systems you need to ensure you have sufficient speed and capability to meet the peak needs or your organisation, for example, a pay run or end of month reporting might be the busiest time for your accounting systems. With applications hosted in ‘the Cloud’, the service provider has to ensure that they have sufficient capacity to meet the needs of their customers at peak times.
Even if you are running your own private Cloud, some of the new hosted server offerings allow you to automatically turn on and off servers as demand increases and decreases – these services are usually billed on an hourly basis so you pay for the increased capacity you need only when you actually need it.
Some organisations are even finding they can scale back their capacity very significantly once outside of normal business hours when fewer employees are attempting to access systems.
Business Continuity
Imagine if the worst was to happen and some kind of disaster, natural or otherwise, was to prevent your employees from accessing their primary location for work. Having your data and applications in ‘the Cloud’ allows them to continue working from home or even a temporary location until normal operations are restored. This just may not be possible using onsite, physical servers.
Equipment failures such as disks and servers have little impact on Cloud based servers due to the redundancy built into good Cloud service provider offerings.
In this four-part series we will look at:
