Cloud has benefited us all. In our personal lives, it has allowed us to upload and store our photos for easy access and relieve ourselves of the burden that is our phone’s storage space. For professionals, however, it has completely revolutionized the workplace. With documents and data stored online businesses have been able to reduce operating costs, improve infrastructure, and of course allowed their employees a better working environment.
Benefits of Using the Cloud
The Cloud has so many benefits, but for businesses, it has allowed:
1. Reduced IT Costs
Without having to run your own hardware you will be able to save on operational costs, IT costs, and still have the ability to scale up or down as necessary. Depending on your business’ size, this could mean a huge amount in savings, as you wouldn’t be tied to a costly server.
2. Ability to Scale Up or Down
Need more space? Easily scale up without any limits. Alternatively, if you have committed to a massive clear out of data and need to scale down your operations, you can just as easily scale your subscription down so that you don’t pay a premium for cloud storage. This is the best and most cost-effective solution for small and medium-sized businesses, whereas large international businesses should consider hosting their own cloud server to provide the same benefits but with complete control.
3. Improved Collaboration
On the front end of things is the ability to collaborate in a never before seen way. Employees in different departments, floors, or even countries can work simultaneously and instantaneously on documents and provide great work in less time. No more emails back-and-forth. No more issues with content being deleted that should not have been. Now your employees can work seamlessly with a full history of backups.
4. Instant Access Anywhere
Your Cloud account can be accessed anywhere, anytime, so long as the user has the right credentials and access to the Internet.
5. Disaster Resistant
Fires and floods won’t be the cause for your entire business shutting down, because servers around the world have your data backed up. If one of your cloud provider’s servers go down, they have other backups for you to keep you up and running.
What to Remember When Using the Cloud
The Cloud, however, is not impervious. There are risks to using it just as there are risks for anything.
There are Still Security Risks
One main risk is endpoint entry. Endpoints refer to the tools that your users will use to access the Cloud account, like their phones or laptops. Similarly, your employees themselves will also be weak points in your system. If they made their access password the same email they use for everything then a hacker who has gained that information can access from their portal. If you don’t have tiers of security so your personnel can only gain access to information relevant to them, this means a hacker can gain access to your entire business. The Cloud can be great. It can be secure. Before you consider it infallible however, you will want to be clued up on what is cloud security and read up its limits, and about how you can better protect your digital data.
Migrating to the Cloud is a very smart move for all types of businesses, just remember to beef up your Cloud’s security and to train your employees to reduce the risk of your data being breached.
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