Ben Jones | cloudcomputingtopics
Cloud computing is ready. But is business ready for it? In some instances, small to medium sized enterprises might still need convincing of its merits beyond the ease of use and affordability. So if you haven’t considered it before, here’s five reasons to move to the cloud.
- First up is all about data backup. All the major cloud storage providers have robust backup procedures giving a level of redundancy that most small & medium sized businesses and personal users just can’t manage. That’s not to say you ought to rely solely on a Cloud storage providers backup, but also taking an additional backup of your Cloud data. And it’s worth bearing in mind a simple rule at this stage; if it doesn’t exist in three places then it doesn’t exist at all. But in the event of a hardware failure who do you think is going to have your data back up faster; you or the Cloud provider with massive server & 24 hour technical resource?
- The second reason is security. A major cloud provider has dedicated security IT professionals tracking a very specific field of IT, knowing where to close the gaps, provide regular updates to the software and operating systems. A SME simply can’t resource wise afford to invest in its own security professionals to maintain an internal system. Your systems are going to be more secure with a dedicated Cloud supplier, so long as you know what you are looking for and the right questions to ask.
- In these money-saving times, price is likely to be the biggest factor on whether you move from an internally hosted IT to a cloud based IT. The competitiveness in the cloud market is really pushing down the prices with half a dozen major brand players all fighting it out. The cost of purchasing your servers, UPS and networking gear; the floor space to store them; the electricity to keep them cool; plus an administrator to keep them running all adds up to a hefty bill at the end of the month. Conclusion? Cloud storage is going to be cheaper and it’s only going to get even cheaper.
- Expertise that just can’t be sourced for love nor money. Cloud providers have the experts to run your non intellectual property based IT requirements. Cloud storage is probably the best example of this with dedicated storage administrators running their systems so really, why would you look to do it internally at a far greater cost?
- And finally there’s the scalability of cloud computing. By the very mechanics behind it, there is an ability to build it up and retract as and when is needed. Take current Pinterest who scaled massively all on Amazon’s elastic computing cloud. They even scale at different times of the day to meet demand and keep the costs down, nevermind up scaling to meet their overall growth pattern. But it’s not just expansion that cloud supports, when the good times roll and you invest in more kit to meet demand all is good but what happens when departments retract and sometimes have to get shuttered? You have leftover hardware to offload that you wasted valuable resources on. The Cloud takes care of all that.
