8 Reasons You Should Move Your Business to the Cloud

The recent pandemic has served as a litmus test for the efficacy of digital strategies for businesses worldwide. Businesses with outdated or ineffective strategies in place faced numerous challenges during the pandemic, while others who adopted modern technology continued to outshine competitors during prolonged lockdowns. To thrive in today’s fiercely competitive digital marketplace post-COVID, businesses should consider exploring cloud-based applications and infrastructure.

Cloud computing has transformed the entire business landscape. Businesses all over the world are rapidly adopting cloud-based solutions for the majority of their day-to-day operational processes. Besides remote access and 24-hour availability, cloud computing offers businesses many advantages. Read on to discover how cloud computing benefits your business and why embracing a cloud-first strategy is important.

Understanding Cloud Technology and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Traditionally, businesses used locally-installed software for conducting day-to-day activities. For this purpose, businesses needed to keep up with the rapidly changing technology, protect their data, and maintain and upgrade their hardware and software consistently. The inception of cloud computing changed the technology dynamics and allowed businesses to use managed servers located remotely for storing and accessing applications and data over the internet. With cloud-based technology, businesses can get infrastructure and expertise from companies specializing in a particular cloud service at much lower costs.

Cloud technology allows businesses to move the entire IT infrastructure to virtual environments, which helps them reduce the cost of maintaining local servers and networks and protecting their data.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a type of cloud computing that provides on-demand application access and processing, data storage, and networking resources over the internet. IaaS services like Microsoft Azure work on a pay-as-you-go model. You can access databases and applications in a cloud-based network on an as-needed basis from cloud service providers instead of setting up local network infrastructures, servers, and data centers.

Benefits of Cloud Technology for Businesses

Businesses that adopted cloud-based solutions experienced higher growth over the years compared to their competitors. If you’re thinking about moving your company to cloud-based solutions, consider these eight benefits:

1.    Reduced Costs

Getting your business into the cloud means transforming your entire technology stack into a virtual environment where the vendor runs and manages all your hardware. This significantly reduces costs in setting up and maintaining local data centers and business applications.

Popular cloud services like Microsoft Azure allow businesses to pay for the same services on demand at a fraction of the cost but with higher security, increased accessibility, and high availability. Since local servers and networks need specialized staff and consistent maintenance expenses, cloud services are frequently less expensive. To access cloud software, you only need an internet-connected device. The cloud software runs in a web browser, so it doesn’t matter what device or OS you use to access it.

2.    Improved Security

Companies that provide cloud services deal with thousands of corporate customers simultaneously. They implement a sophisticated cloud infrastructure with the latest data encryption mechanisms. This makes cloud computing safer than local infrastructures. Cloud services provide the latest security patches to corporate customers and include built-in security features in the applications and services to keep the data secure from increasing cybersecurity threats. Cloud services essentially implement web and application firewalls and virtual private networks for maximum protection against potential breaches. In addition, they offer several ways to protect your data, like monitoring data access, user activities, and network traffic, as well as sending push notifications in case of suspicious activities.

3.    Increased Scalability

Nearly all public and hybrid cloud service providers offer a pay-as-you-go model for cloud-based solutions. Businesses can subscribe or unsubscribe from services according to their needs. In this way, businesses can adjust their business model according to their needs and scale up or down without incurring additional costs.

4.    Empowers Remote Work

The onset of the pandemic has accelerated the concept of remote work. The positive outcomes of remote work environments have compelled businesses to promote remote work. Employees can work closely with other team members from any location through cloud-based solutions. It allows teams to connect and share information in real-time in a collaborative workspace. Employees can access applications from anywhere and on any device to perform their tasks. They have instant access to the information they need to do their jobs.

5.    Greater Flexibility

Cloud-based solutions can support a wide range of devices and operating systems. Since cloud-based applications only require a device connected to the internet, it helps create flexible work environments. Businesses can easily implement a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy for both on-premises and remote work.

6.    Increased Productivity

Taking your business to the cloud is one of the best things you can do to save money and free up your internal resources and staff. You can redirect their energies towards core business functions and focus more on essential projects and products important for your business’s growth. The available IT human resource will have more time to focus on improving the quality of service for both employees and customers. Employees use an all-in-one work environment to carry out their daily activities instead of switching from one local software tool to another.

7.    Efficient Data Recovery

Disaster recovery plans and incident response are one of the most important aspects of cybersecurity. To keep the data secure, businesses traditionally invested heavily in security infrastructure and the implementation of data security protocols. In the event of a security breach, businesses with local data centers suffered a massive loss of sensitive customer and corporate data, costing them thousands of dollars and damaging their reputation.

While cloud-based solutions provide built-in data security, data recovery in the event of a local data breach is also much easier. The remote database servers and virtual data centers are responsible for maintaining data backups in multiple layers of redundancy and accelerating data recovery in case a security breach occurs. Besides security, cloud-based solutions keep the database safe from being corrupted or destroyed.

8.    Easy Maintenance and Upgradation

As technology continues to evolve, businesses are in a constant race to adopt the latest technology and upgrade existing infrastructures to meet the changing market trends and customer needs. Businesses that use proprietary software often fail to keep up with the maintenance and upgradation of local applications. With cloud-based solutions, businesses can access the latest updates without a major infrastructure upgrade. Cloud service companies are responsible for maintaining and upgrading application software and virtual network infrastructure. Updates are developed and automatically implemented on the application by the vendor. Businesses do not require upgrading, reinstalling, or maintaining software themselves.

Final Thoughts

Cloud technology is expected to be the driving force in business for a long time. It helps businesses reduce major expenses and frees up resources that can be funneled to more critical business processes. To choose the right type of cloud service, you must first evaluate your existing back-end IT infrastructure, plan a budget based on the number of subscriptions you require, analyze the type of security environment your business needs, and estimate future scalability.