What are Cloud Solutions?

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Cloud solutions are services for storing files, collaboration, email, accounting software, or other applications that have historically been hosted on a server residing on your office network and run them on servers residing on a 3rd party infrastructure.  In non-tech terms…cloud solutions take some or even all the IT resources you need to run your business, moves them to another company’s infrastructure giving your company additional benefits and functionality.

 

BUT WHY is this a good thing?

 

Benefits

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• Cost savings

Cloud solutions work on the pay-as-you-go system.One common scenario is…With a cloud solution when you need 1TB of data storage, you pay for 1TB of storage.  3 years later when you need 2TB of storage, your cloud solution payment increases to allow 2TB of data.  In contrast if you host your data storage internally you will make an initial investment for a server that has enough storage allocated for years 1, 2, and 3.  During year 1 and 2, you have still paid for the additional space on your internal storage, but you didn’t use it.  This is a very simple example of cloud solutions cost savings, but the tangible costs alone are often not enough to drive cloud adoptions.  The ROI from productivity enhancements, better collaboration, mobility, and security all need to be taken into consideration.  Keep reading the bullets below to get a better idea where your ROI for cloud solutions can be seen.

 

• Increased flexibility

Cloud solutions give you the ability to incrementally scale up without time-consuming investments in additional local infrastructure.  When your business grows and you need more IT resources, cloud solutions offer a seamless experience often meeting your additional IT resource demand instantly.

 

• Collaboration efficiency

There are many collaboration programs, but the ones based on cloud technology make communicating easy.  Collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and Slack provide a large list of functionality and go beyond just “chat” by providing services like voice calls, video calls, and 3rd party integrations.

 

• Mobility

Cloud solutions break the tie employees have with your local office.  Cloud solutions often give you the ability to “work anywhere” as well as open your IT services to other devices like mobile phones and tablets.  Giving employees the ability to work outside the confines of an office and options of devices to use has shown to boost productivity.

 

• Business continuity

Cloud services are often running on disperse system located in multiple data centers.  At the top tier, these data centers are even geographically dispersed across multiple time zones.  In non tech terms, this means a flood in your office or a local Internet outage doesn’t not keep your cloud services from functioning.  Instead of waiting for services to be restored and loosing productivity, you can temporarily move to another location like your home office and access your business-critical services.

 

• Automatic updates

Cloud services include automatic updating.  You don’t have to complete updates or pay someone to complete updates to the programs.  Updates just happen in the background. This is beneficial from a security aspect, since often critical security updates are time sensitive.  It is also beneficial from gaining new functionality when it is release without having to continuously update your local programs.

 

• Security

Once a deciding factor for not adopting cloud services, this is no longer the case.  Cloud hosting providers take security very seriously, and they have no choice in today’s Internet landscape.  They have dedicated teams that monitor and provide security for the services the cloud provider is hosting.  In reality, a business’s risk of data being compromised is far greater by your internal employee than an internet hacker.  There are many ways to protect your data from both internal and external threats. Integrity can help you implement or true up your cloud security to protect against threats, both internal and Internet based.

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The benefits of using Cloud solutions are great, but they don’t fit all companies and they certainly don’t replace 100% of the required IT resources within your company.  This is where Integrity Technology Services helps our partners.  We can explore the vast cloud solutions with your company, recommend what makes sense, and implement the cloud solutions for your company that will create the best increase of functionality and return on investment (ROI).