In recent years we have seen an increase in the amount of cloud utilisation by small to medium businesses. With constant growth and a need to ‘keep up with the times’ it is not uncommon to see these small local businesses throwing out their old hardware and moving to a mostly cloud based solution. This is because of three main reasons:
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Affordability
With cloud services, it is quick and easy to set up storage, archiving, emails and many other features that a growing company needs. Traditionally, you would buy hardware to improve onsite systems to meet the demands of your workforce. With cloud systems this is not the case. You pay monthly and can easily scale hardware as and when you require. Running out of storage space on your main file server? Now you can easily increase the storage limit in minutes. This will raise your monthly cost. However, this can be easier to manage than paying out a large sum for all these upgrades at once (in this case the cost of buying X amount of hard drives).
With the classical workplace era slowly coming to an end (An office and a desk from 9am-5pm) in favour of working remotely and via your own devices, the utilisation of cloud services has followed. Whether these cloud solutions have directly caused this shift in the working environment or have merely been a product of its demand I’m unsure of, but we can implement them regardless. Employees can now complete tasks at home or onsite, the number of workstations needed in the office are reduced and productivity skyrockets due to this increased flexibility. From a management perspective this saves costs even further.
There are several other reasons making the switch to a purely cloud infrastructure is beneficial even if it is just for your storage. Files stored in a correctly configured cloud are more secure due to the physical data centres they are kept in. These contain highly sophisticated hardware with increased levels of redundancy and security.
I hope this helps you understand a few of the reasons we recommend the big move over to a cloud system. There are many different options out there and they are all designed to accommodate to a different type of business. Get in touch if you wish to learn more.