Top 5 Reasons Your Business Needs Cloud Servers
The old-school approach to IT infrastructure is to house servers inside your business location. But times have changed, and current technologies make it far more beneficial to make use of cloud servers instead.
Cloud servers offer a mountain of benefits for both small and large businesses. Your IT resources are probably already stretched thin, working on strategic business objectives and important projects. Managing and maintaining critical local servers only puts unnecessary workload on your IT staff.
Let’s look at five other ways migrating to the cloud will benefit your business.
Scalability and Cost
In a traditional business environment, if you’re trying to implement something like a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, or the latest next generation software, you’ll discover that many of these solutions require dedicated servers with big specifications.
Phase one of such a project will be consulting with your IT department to understand the capacity of your current infrastructure, and whether it can handle all of these software demands. You will most likely be required to purchase new hardware.
What if you, instead, could just ask your cloud hosting vendor to increase your capacity as needed? Within an hour, you’d have everything you need to move on to the next phase of the project.
This is the power of scalability that cloud services offer.
At the start, you can establish the size of your cloud infrastructure with only what you need for your business, but as you grow you can expand as needed.
Business Continuity and Reliability
You’ve probably experienced what happens when a power surge takes down one of your critical servers.
Often it brings your entire business to a halt, until your IT team can either repair or replace it. Often, in-house IT resources scramble to find a solution, don’t have the skills necessary, or don’t have the proper backup strategy to recover from major disasters in a timely manner, so they outsource to expensive technical contractors. This increases downtime, decreases productivity, and ultimately affects your bottom-line.
When you use cloud servers, you offload this responsibility to the cloud service vendor.
Because ensuring business continuity is a critical part of the cloud services, these companies take this responsibility very seriously.
Successful cloud hosting companies:
- Perform frequent backups of all of your servers.
- Backups are stored at off-site locations so that even in the event of major disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, your critical business data and applications can be restored.
- Technical teams are specially trained to ensure your business enjoys minimal downtime.
Many of the best companies offer upwards of over 99% guarantees, financially backed by a service level agreement (SLA).
Performance
Early on, small businesses have little need for high-performance servers. Unfortunately, to future-proof the business, these companies need to purchase an over-sized servers at very high costs.
This means that for many years, the business is running its applications on servers that are vastly overpowered for today’s needs. As the business grows and reaches that capacity, the servers start to age and slowdown, which may result in hardware failure.
It’s a frustrating experience for everyone.
A cloud solution gives you the flexibility to pay only for what your business needs, right from the start. As your business grows and you start to reach capacity, with a few clicks, your cloud vendor will boost resources and performance to meet your needs.
As you start to explore new technologies like artificial intelligence or blockchain, cloud servers provide you with all the capacity you need. It means no longer letting your aging infrastructure hold you back from making progress.
Security
A lingering myth among many business owners is that it’s safer to keep their infrastructure in a locked room within their own facility.
The reality is that a well-configured and well-managed cloud environment is far more secure for several reasons.
- Cloud vendors constantly monitor their systems and respond immediately to any external attack. Unfortunately even large corporations that opt for on-premises security have had hackers infiltrate their systems for weeks before detecting the issue.
- Security administrators at cloud service companies are experts at access-control policies that ensure not only that bad people are kept out, but also business-critical information is kept inside your cloud infrastructure.
- Cloud vendors perform regular vulnerability testing to ensure systems are secure, because their entire business depends on it.
- Cloud servers receive automatic patches and updates when they’re released, making your business data less vulnerable to attacks.
In 2017, InfoWorld published a survey of 300 IT professionals and found that an impressive 78 percent of them agreed that cloud security is better than on-premises security.
Flexibility
Cloud services are making the traditional workday a thing of the past.
Gone are the days when employees need to be sitting inside their office to be productive.
Cloud services allow staff to securely connect to their company network via encrypted connections and using secure authentication methods.
The benefits of this go beyond mere convenience. When workers can sit in a coffee shop and connect to company systems, they tend to be more productive.
They can access systems even when they’re traveling, which breaks down roadblocks during critical crunch times during large projects.
Google conducted a survey of small businesses and found a number of ways the flexibility of the cloud improved business.
- 69% of respondents said that cloud productivity technology fueled their business growth
- 60% reported that access to their data via the cloud saved time
- 81% told Google that the ability to share files via the cloud was critical to their business
- 73% of respondents said mobile access to data allowed them to close more sales
It’s impossible to measure all the business benefits a cloud-solution brings, but it’s clear many businesses are seeing tremendous success.
Is the Cloud Right for Your Business?
If you feel like now may be the perfect time to transition your business to the cloud, it’s important to choose a service provider you know you can trust.
Online Owls is one of those service providers. With a technically knowledgeable staff, high-performance cloud servers, and security standards that are at the top of the industry, Online Owls is a perfect solution to help you migrate your aging on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
Just visit our website or give us a call at 1-888-636-6957 and one of our cloud experts will be happy to get to know your business and provide you guidance to get started.
