Adopting Cloud Computing for Your Business

The 6 Achievable Advantages – and 3 Minor Challenges

You’ve heard cloud computing is the way forward, but you’re still not entirely sure why or whether the much-talked-about benefits of cloud can actually be delivered in practice. Let us explain.

Think about the difference cloud computing has made to your everyday life through platforms such as Gmail, Google Drive, and even Facebook and Instagram. All are cloud-based applications that hold personal data for sharing across different networks. Now imagine if that freedom, mobility and scale could benefit your work environment too.

Cloud computing, according to the dictionary, means ‘the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.’ Beyond the basic definition – and in the real world – this means cloud computing is part of pretty much everything we do in daily life. Banking apps, social media, photo storage, email, online shopping – it’s all possible thanks to the cloud.

Of course, it’s not just our personal lives; businesses and governments are increasingly reliant on cloud computing too. The adoption of cloud infrastructure and applications has become essential to running a modern work place. Data security, scalability, availability and mobility are no longer a nice to have, but a need to have. With predictable costs, improved security and resilience, organizations have intrinsically become more agile and efficient by moving to the cloud. According to the 2021 SMB IT and Business Operations Pain Points Study from Keypoint Intelligence and Konica Minolta, nearly half (45%) of SMBs surveyed have acquired or upgraded cloud data storage within the last year.

If you were to ask these organizations what advantages they have discovered to cloud computing, their answer would be something like the following.

The 6 achievable advantages of cloud computing

It’s flexible: Cloud computing offers you and your business a highly flexible way of working. The right cloud computing plan can be altered according to the business needs of a company. Often, you have the choice between different cloud SLAs. Minimize the lead time needed to implement new resources, deploy new applications or add new users anytime, anywhere.
It’s scalable: Cloud provides elasticity – again, the perfect fit for a fast-changing and increasingly uncertain world. If you have a slower business period, you don’t need to worry about maintaining an oversized computing budget; you can simply scale down. And if you’re (hopefully) having a better business period, you scale up. Instead of purchasing excess capacity that just sits unused during slow business periods, you can boost your network capacity up and down in tune with your business needs.