Why Cloud Services? - Part 1
"Cloud services provide many important advantages."
Why every business should embrace using cloud services
Cloud computing and cloud storage are some of the most popular buzzwords that have made rounds on the internet for the past ten years. Cloud services have become very popular among individuals and businesses because of the many advantages they have over the traditional local/on-premise computing solutions that we were all used to.
If you are keen to learn about the major benefits of cloud services to small and medium-sized enterprises, this article is for you.
What are cloud services?
Before we get into the benefits of cloud services, let’s, first of all, understand what this term means. Cloud services refer to a wide range of computing and storage services delivered on-demand to businesses and individuals via the internet. Some examples of cloud services include; Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and cloud-based application suites such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and others.
Benefits of cloud services
1. Saves costs
One of the primary reasons businesses should migrate from local computing and storage is the lower prices of cloud services. With cloud computing/storage, you don’t have to buy powerful hardware even if your workloads require this power. All you need are basic computers that you can use to access the internet and paying for the subscription fee of the cloud computing/storage service that you need.
The beauty of cloud computing is that you only pay for the resources you use. For example, if you choose to run your internal company web application on Amazon Web Services, Amazon will only charge you for the RAM, storage, and CPU resources the application is using. That means during low traffic days (like on weekends), the charges per hour will be lower than the charges during peak days.
2. Enhances remote working
When you have all your organization’s data and systems hosted on the cloud, your team will access everything they need to continue working even when they are not physically present at the work premises. Cloud platforms like Slack, Google WorkSpace, and Microsoft 356 have made it easier for organizations’ teams to communicate and collaborate on projects remotely.
3. More reliable
It is more reliable to use cloud computing and storage services than the local solutions. Most of these cloud platforms invest billions of dollars in their infrastructure to make it resilient and robust. So, when you store data or deploy an application on the cloud, you are pretty sure that you will always access it whenever you want to. Building such infrastructure locally requires a considerable investment that most small businesses can’t afford.
4. Seamless software integration
With cloud services, the different applications that your business uses can easily communicate and exchange data. The experience is even better if you use applications from the same service provider.
For example, if you choose Google WorkSpace, all the applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Drive, and many more will seamlessly communicate and exchange data. This kind of experience is not possible with local computing/storage solutions.
Coming Up in Part 2
In the next article in this series, we'll dive more deeply into the power of cloud-based apps and suites like Microsoft 365.