Making the Decision to Move Your Business to the Cloud

How to Decide for Your Business: Making the Decision to Move to the Cloud

The technology world makes frequent mention of “the cloud”, which often makes it difficult to determine if this too is just another tech buzzword or if “the cloud” is actually a key tool to help enable your business operations to succeed.

At the most basic level, cloud-based technology consist of hardware and software resources that you access through off-site based resources, instead of through an on-premise installation.The cloud also pools its resources together for higher performance and greater redundancy, instead of assigning a single piece of hardware to your business.

What Makes the Cloud Worthwhile?

With 87 percent of small and medium sized businesses already using some form of cloud technology, according to PC World, it is evident that the cloud has a strong following with SMBs. You may even be using cloud services in your business without realizing it — Gmail, Dropbox and Evernote are all commonly used cloud applications.

The cloud provides your business with a wide range of tools, from software to complete infrastructures, opening up your access to high performance technology. Instead of running your internal communication program off an aging server in an unused closet, you get access to integrated solutions running off the latest high end hardware.

Security is a common concern for many businesses considering cloud adoption. Fortunately, the security available often exceeds what you may currently have at your own office. A study by Right Scale found that only 13 percent of companies who have adopted cloud technologies have significant security concerns, compared to 31 percent of companies who are new to cloud technology adoption.

Maintaining strong security is in each cloud vendor’s best interests, as their entire business models revolve around reliable access, data integrity and the security of sensitive information.

The flexibility offered by cloud services also make this technology budget friendly for SMBs. Many cloud vendors operate on a subscription model that may be a flat rate or a per user rate, so instead of paying for costly hardware, a large number of software licenses and the costs associated with deployment upfront, your business pays a recurring fee for access to the services provided.

Your organization can then easily scale your users or your capacity up and down as needed, because the service cost scales with your business as opposed to having to implement large projects after hitting particular usage thresholds.

Your IT security budget may be competing with a range of other expenses within your overall business budget, but with the right guidance from your IT support services team, identifying the best cloud computing solutions who place high priority on maintaining the appropriate security measures can pay off in significant savings as well as improved office IT performance.

What You Need to Support Cloud Deployment

Cloud technology isn’t reserved only for businesses with full in-house IT departments. In many cases, your small to midsize business may be examining options when it comes time for an infrastructure upgrade, and while reviewing what you currently have in place and the softwares deployed, you may start to question the value proposition associated with the higher upfront costs of having your business upgrade or replace outdated or failing onsite infrastructure.

When looking to move your office technologies forward, you want to find out the best ways possible to streamline and cut outunnecessary IT work from the outset. So what do you do once you’re all set up with your cloud services but you don’t have the IT resources to properly train and support users?

Instead of holding back on adopting technology that could vastly improve your business productivity simply because you don’t currently have the IT manpower available, bring on a IT support service provider to get your organization started leveraging cloud technology the right way from the very beginning and to keep everything running smoothly going into the future.

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