HOW CAN YOUR INVESTMENT IN CLOUD GIVE YOU A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE?

Cloud computing is a platform built around sharing a huge pool of resources between different users. A lot of organizations often over purchase the traditional resources like servers for the fear of losing out on potential work. As a result they are locked to a hardware provider and have to make necessary adjustments to accommodate IT support staff on their payroll. Cloud computing eliminates such guess work by enabling users to have a fine tuned control over the amount of resources they use or need at any particular time. A large number of businesses have started to move their operations to cloud and enough interest has already been generated that almost all the major players like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have their own cloud products and services to cater to a wide variety of usage models. Cloud can help you to completely transform a business model by changing the way traditional infrastructure investment works. Organizations that depend on cloud no longer need to make huge capital investments in infrastructure and maintenance. Instead, they can just pay as they use the resources or subscribe to one of the many customized cloud computing plans offered by different vendors.

Adopting cloud computing and integrating it with your business can help you in different ways and can give you a strong advantage over your competitors as listed below:

Transformation of infrastructure in to an operating expense:

By using cloud, your business does not need to devote an entire IT support team to maintain your infrastructure. Also, the hardware and software upgrades, maintenance and energy requirements need not be taken care of as they come bundled with in the package. Using cloud, you can convert your huge capital expenditure in infrastructure in to smaller operating costs over the time period. This results in a better cash flow to your business as you can plan your infrastructure expenses well before the required time. This enables your organization to be flexible and to accept business or work limited by your competitive skill and not by your infrastructure.

Incredible scalability:

With cloud, you do not need to cancel or postpone a project because of lack of computing resources. If you have the manpower required to achieve the target, with cloud you only need to purchase additional resources instantly. This helps small and medium size businesses with unpredictable work patterns to cut down on technology costs depending on the amount of work. Being able to step up your resources at any moment due to the pay as you go model of cloud, gives an excellent competitive edge to your business over others.

Accessibility of resources:

When you move your business to cloud, you are moving all your work to a remote server farm, which securely stores and processes your information. Your employees can access your business resources over the cloud through the internet from anywhere in the world. This greatly improves their work efficiency as your employees can work from anywhere and still have the same kind of connectivity and accessibility as when they are in office. Due to the remote work compatibility provided by cloud, you can fill the skill gaps present in your organization by outsourcing such work to specialized freelancers or technology firms that offer remote assistance. This will translate in to a competitive advantage for your firm in terms of easy adaptability and will help you increase your footprint in the markets that your business serves.

Integrated support for mobile:

As portable devices like smartphones and tablets enter the business environment, it becomes a hassle to connect them to the business network and design various mobile applications. But with cloud, the support for mobile comes integrated as many vendors who provide cloud services also provide customized native android or IOS mobile apps for their customers. With these apps, you can login from any supported device be it mobile or standard desktop or laptop and access your resources.

Availability and reliability:

Compared to the traditional infrastructure resources, cloud based resources have a very high uptime with negligible and well-planned downtime, if any. Therefore, you can be assured that your services will always be running and your customers have a reliable service. With cloud, your resources are shared between hundreds of similar customers on a high capacity server. So your data is backed up multiple times in different locations on different servers. Even in the unlikely event of a server crash, you can fully expect that your application, storage and services are restored within minutes. This high redundancy coupled with high availability provides an unmatched advantage to any business that uses cloud.

Improved security:

With cloud, you have a well-planned security model, which monitors every connection made to the servers and has continuous tracking of events. Such a high level of security is generally not possible to implement on local resources, as they need a well-trained team of network security experts. Also, physically these servers are located in remote locations and are well guarded with round the clock monitoring. Comparatively, it could be relatively easy for a hacker to break in to your organization using social engineering tricks and deploy a physical hack to steal information.

Enhanced information privacy:

In terms of privacy, most of the cloud vendors encrypt your information before it is stored on their servers. The encryption keys are given to your business so only you or employees authenticated by you will have access to files and resources. You can also implement a well-defined user authentication mechanism and restrict certain information to only some groups of your workforce. Implementing the same on a local system can be very costly and not so secure. In the cases where a hacker might obtain your data, they will be unable to decrypt it without the key. This ensures that the confidential documents and information related to your firm always stays private.

Availability of wide range of software services:

Moving to the cloud provides a firm with unparalleled access to compatible software services like analytics, data mining, collaborative tools etc. Services like analytics can analyze your business data to derive patterns, which can be helpful in identifying weak areas of your business and focus on improving them. Cloud’s software as a service model readily provides a large number of commercial software for software development, testing and reporting tools on the cloud. Such services can streamline various divisions of your business like HR, Customer management and core teams and dramatically improve the quality of your services. Apart from these major advantages, deploying cloud in major areas of your business can improve your technology quality significantly. Resources provided by cloud are well maintained and are upgraded frequently to match the latest standards in security and compliance. Using Cloud means better maintained resources and a better technology environment for your employees to work on. It has the potential to significantly affect a business’ productivity and efficiency. Hence, it is recommended that a business, which uses technology in a significant way, should transition to cloud before it is too late, to achieve its maximum potential.