The growth of cloud technology over the last few years has been remarkable. In short, cloud is fast becoming the new normal. By the end of 2015 it’s estimated that 90% of UK businesses will be using at least one cloud service.
The reason for this kind of rapid growth is quite clear: cloud helps businesses address their objectives. But when the internet is flooded with technical information about how cloud works, what the different deployment methods are, and what you need to look for in a provider, it’s difficult to know where to start when you’re just getting on board with the technology.
Here are the various different ways cloud can help to deliver against key business objectives:
1. Growth
On-site IT can hold you back as a business. It’s expensive and time consuming to purchase and manage new hardware, and it takes up valuable space in your office. But with cloud, when you grow as a business, there’s nothing to stand in the way because all the physical hardware is taken care of, so you can quickly and easily add new people to teams with the tools they need.
2. Agility
Cloud-based services are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your needs increase it’s easy to scale up your cloud capacity, drawing on the service’s remote servers. Likewise, if you need to scale down again, the flexibility is baked into the service. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.
3. Mobility
Work today is fast becoming a thing you do, not a place you go. Today’s workers expect to be able to work on trains, from home, at airports, in hotel rooms — in virtually any location where they can get an internet connection. What’s more, they want to work across tablets, smartphones and laptops, just in the same way they operate across their own personal devices.
The global growth in employee mobility is continuing at pace and the world will see 1.75 billion mobile workers by 2020, accounting for 42.0% of the global workforce. Cloud technology provides you with a way to ensure that all employees remain productive, wherever they’re working and whatever device they use.
4. Disaster recovery / business continuity
Disasters happen, but the risk of not being able to work because your IT is down is not worth taking. The cost of doing nothing and suffering a severe outage will almost always be more than the cost of an effective cloud-based disaster recovery solution.
Cloud ensures that if your sites are knocked out by, say, freak weather conditions, you’re still able to access your servers — and if you combine disaster recovery with mobility, your employees don’t have to come to the office, but work from home instead.
5. Collaboration
When your teams can access, edit and share documents anytime, from anywhere, they’re able to do more together, and do it better. Cloud-based workflow and file sharing apps help them make updates in real time and gives them full visibility of their collaborations.
So, what’s the next step?
If you’re serious about cloud technology it’s time to start thinking about how you can adopt this throughout your organisation. Contact Marlin Communications today on 08000 328274 about how we can help deliver services that meet your exact needs.
