Saving your data in the cloud could save your company. The rise of cyber crime and the increase in big data creates susceptibility to data theft, corruption, or loss. In the case where your data storage becomes vulnerable, it’s imperative to have a backup plan. However, moving to the cloud could be a major indicator on how well your data is stored and safeguarded.
Most often, small businesses backup data using a secondary or external hard drive or a central server where files are stored. While many businesses take some precautions to back up their data, they often don’t do enough. The cloud is perfect for moving away from local storage to a more scalable environment that will grow alongside your business needs.
4 Benefits you can expect immediately after moving to the cloud:
- Cost Savings: When you run your own servers, you’re looking at up-front capital costs. But in the world of cloud-computing, financing that capital investment is a cost of the cloud provider. Additionally, you can reduce the manpower in your IT department spent on storage costs as a result of moving to the cloud. Companies that move to cloud computing find they can redistribute their valuable IT resources to areas that focus on business growth and not maintenance. No one gets fired, just redistributed.
- Storage Capacity: The cloud not only scales with your data, but the costs align with the amount of data you have at the current time, not the amount of data you think you might have in the future. There is no more worry about running out of computing space. Input as much data as you need to progress your business.
- Improved Operations: You can access your data at anytime from anywhere. Business operations can be continued even with a huge increase in big data. No more downtime to update and maintain servers. No downtime = higher productivity + higher profits.
- Security Since you’re outsourcing to a cloud provider, you can vet them as much as needed to ensure that you feel your data is safe in their cloud environment. You will entrust your data to a provider so that it then becomes their job to provide 24×7 protection, monitoring, and scaling of your data. With this monitoring usually comes a disaster recovery plan so that in case of emergency your data will always have a backup.
Cloud computing could become one of the most important pieces in your business arsenal. If you have any doubts about cloud computing, a simple research initiative with a cloud provider could ease many of your worries. Staying in the past with on-premise hardware with limited storage capacity, that your own IT team needs to maintain, will ensure that business growth is also a thing of the past. The cloud can grow with you and your business into the future.