Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. In our new digital age, the cloud has become a major piece for many businesses. Learning to maximize its usage is key to any business that wants to survive as the years go on. The following guest post is entitled, Cloud Computing Technology: Why Your Business Needs It.
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Over 83 percent of business workloads will be done on the cloud by 2020, according to a recent report by infrastructure monitoring firm LogicMonitor. Despite concerns with security and implementation, cloud adoption continues to grow, as the industry is projected to earn 17 percent more in 2020 compared to last year.
A lot of articles and experts that talk about the importance of technology in business cite cloud computing is the future. This is because it has a wide variety of cost, collaboration, and efficiency benefits to companies, especially small and medium-sized ones.
How does the platform work and what are its benefits to your company?
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing involves using applications and storage on the internet instead of your computer’s hard drive or office servers. Think of it as renting computing capacity from an outside provider.
It comes in three categories:
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – This involves renting the servers, virtualization, and other network hardware and software of your provider to create software based on your chosen platform.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – PaaS has everything that IaaS has, but with development and business intelligence tools built-in. All you need to do is to develop your enterprise software.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) – Here, the provider hosts applications on its servers and makes it available for customers to use immediately. This includes applications you probably already use in your business, like Salesforce, Google G Suite, MailChimp, and more. For small businesses, it’s best to stick with SaaS since all you need to do is learn and use the software instead of developing it yourself.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing usage continues to grow, and it’s because of the following advantages:
• Work Anywhere, Anytime – Cloud applications can be used on any device with a browser and an internet connection. Some providers even provide mobile apps. As such, you can check on your company’s productivity or even get some work done from anywhere you are in the world.
• Better Collaboration – Gone are the days of passing files manually either through hard copies or email. Cloud applications, like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides offer collaboration tools that let you and your team edit and comment on the same live document. This provides one source of truth instead of multiple revised files.
• Scalability – Cloud providers often have a pay-as-you-go model, which means you only pay for the resources you use. If your company is still starting out, you can get a basic subscription that provides usage for a few users. As you expand, you can scale up your subscription to accommodate more employees. Because you don’t need to install any kind of software or hardware, the modifications to your plan happen immediately.
If you want to improve and save on your business processes, try to look for ways to take them to the cloud. Apart from freeing up your office space of large stacks of servers, it provides you with flexible, scalable, and collaborative applications that can increase the productivity, quality, and efficiency of your work. As long as you have a trustworthy and experienced cloud computing provider, your business is sure to enjoy these benefits and more.
