In today’s climate, technology is becoming more of an integral part of a business’s strategy. People may be working on unsecure networks or have devices that can’t support remote work, but whatever situation you find yourself in, there is one option that can protect your business in surprising ways: the cloud. The cloud can help to achieve business goals all while reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and optimizing resource utilization.
A lot of businesses have been switching over to the cloud to reap the benefits it comes with, but some people are still skeptical because they might not know exactly what it is or what they can achieve. If you are new to the scene and you want to make sure you are getting the most out of your services, you might want to know about the most common cloud computing uses. Maamar Ferkoun from IBM shares his top seven.
The first use of the cloud is through infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS). IaaS is a form of cloud computing that provides computing resources over the internet. PaaS is also a category of cloud computing that enables you to develop, run, and manage your business applications without the need to build or maintain your own infrastructure. Using an existing infrastructure helps you save on all the associated costs. IaaS and PaaS also help to increase network speeds and efficiency. This way, you will be able to quickly scale up your resources to accommodate spikes in demand and then scale back down with decreased activity.
The cloud also has private, public, and hybrid platforms for use depending on your needs. The public cloud is a computing service that is offered by third-party providers over the internet making it available to anyone who wants to purchase and use cloud services. A hybrid cloud model is when businesses use a mix of an on-premise private cloud and third-party public cloud services to work together. This enables cost savings and improved performance for your business.
Next, the cloud helps with testing and development environments. The cloud helps to reduce installation and administration costs through standardized delivery of services and preconfigured software. There is also no downtime for download, installation, or setup processes.
Leveraging the cloud also gives you the ability to access both structured and unstructured data to extract value from it. This can help your business understand consumer buying patterns and use that to target your marketing campaigns towards a particular segment.
This next use is particularly helpful now when a majority of people are still working from home. The cloud offers the ability to store and access your files from anywhere at any time over the internet. With the right experts behind the scenes, the cloud is just as secure as an on-site server. In fact, it is more secure. In this way, the cloud gives your business high availability, speed, and scalability when working in the office or remotely.
The cloud also helps support disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is a set of policies, tools, and procedures that enables recovery or continuation of your technology infrastructure and systems after a natural or human–induced disaster. So, when something inevitably goes wrong, your data will be backed up to an off-site, secure location, able to be accessed at any time.
Finally, the cloud offers data backups. Data backups, if done without the cloud, can be complex and time consuming. Cloud–based backups move and store your data to a secondary location in a remote cloud server. This allows you to access your data from multiple sources so that way if your server crashes, you have your data saved somewhere else.
As you can see, there seem to be endless possibilities when it comes to utilizing the cloud. You can pick and choose what services fit your business’s needs and pay as you go. You can also rest assured that your data will be protected and easily attainable when disaster strikes. This just shows that the cloud offers better flexibility than your traditional servers. As a business owner, you want to make sure you are operating the most efficient way possible. So, what better way than the cloud? You can get started with the cloud today.
