If you own any variation of the technological device in today’s world, you’ve surely heard a lot about the cloud and how it is taking the business world by storm. What you might not know is exactly what the cloud is and what you stand to benefit from implementing it into your daily life. If you’re wondering this but are too afraid to ask, luckily we’ve broken it down for you.
The cloud is a type of software or service that runs via the Internet, rather than locally on your computer. Most cloud services can be accessed through any Web browser and some cloud companies have dedicated mobile apps as well. A few examples of these cloud platforms include Google Drive, Apple iCloud, and Dropbox. Within these systems, you can access your information on any device with an Internet connection, allowing you to live and work on the fly without needing to stay connected to local servers.
While you now understand what the cloud is, you might still be wondering exactly why so many businesses are moving to the cloud or why yours should follow suit. Even in its simplest form, cloud computing increases efficiency, helps improve profit margins, along with many more benefits, which you can explore further here:
Reduced IT Costs
Because of the simplicity and uniformization of cloud computing, moving your servers can reduce the cost of both managing and maintaining your IT systems. The cloud can help you avoid purchasing expensive systems and equipment for your business. Instead, you can reduce overhead expenses by using the resources built into your cloud service provider. Operating costs are most often reduced due to cutting out expensive costs of system upgrades on both hardware and software. On top of that, you can save money by no longer needing to pay wages for expert staff, reducing energy consumption and experiencing fewer delays that eat into productive work hours.
Scalability
As your business grows, you’ll want to have tools already implemented that are prepared to expand with your new needs. Cloud-based services are ideal for growing businesses or those with fluctuating bandwidth. As your needs increase, your cloud computer service provider can make upgrades for you rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself. Likewise, if you need to scale your business down, the flexibility allows you to do so easily as well. Not only will this ability give you peace of mind as your business grows, but it can give your business an advantage over competitors.
Flexibility
With the implementation of cloud computing, you can be connected to work from anywhere that has internet access. Even further, with the help of cloud-connected mobile apps, you can work from whatever device you have in hand. Because of this, your business can offer flexible work benefits to your employee base and encourage them to enjoy the work-life balance that suits them—without reducing productivity. Flexible work arrangements have reportedly increased productivity, boosted employee satisfaction and reduced turnover, making it a valuable improvement to make for your business.
Improved Customer Support
It’s no secret that customer support is a vital yet difficult business aspect to perfect. Keeping your customers happy is critical, but can take up a lot of your team’s valuable time. Luckily, shifting your business to the cloud can help make customer service management that much easier with the help of automated call center tools. Cloud call center software allows your employees to take inbounding and make outbounding calls with only an internet connection and a computer, ensuring their customers are tended to in real-time. This not only improves productivity for your customer service team but will also keep your customers coming back for more, improving the longevity of relationships as well.
Disaster Recovery
With the increase in cyber attacks year after year, businesses of all sizes should be investing in robust disaster recovery technology. For smaller businesses, this may seem like a challenge due to the required cash expertise. However, the cloud is a huge help for small organizations by making backup and recovery solutions affordable and simple. Cloud solutions allow you to avoid large up-front costs and third-party contractors, which drive costs up quickly. Because backup and recovery are imperative for the success of your company’s future, it’s another huge benefit of cloud computing that should influence your consideration to switch.
Automatic Updates
Because the servers for cloud systems are off-premise, out of sight and out of your hair, updating your apps and servers is a breeze. Your cloud supplier will likely take care of all updates for you and simply inform you when they roll out new software updates—including up-to-date security measures, the newest features, bug fixes and plenty of other important advantages—so you don’t have to think about or waste time updating the system yourself. This will leave you available to focus on the things that matter, such as everyday activities that will lead to profit and business growth.
Document Control
One benefit that you might not realize is associated with implementing a cloud system is increased document collaboration and control. Before the cloud, employees would collaborate by sending files to one another as email attachments, back and forth as drafts were updated by one user at a time. As you can imagine, often times you’d end up with a mess of conflicting file content, formats and titles. The cloud helps control this chaos by storing all files centrally so multiple people can work on drafts at once and they all can see one unified, most recent version. This visibility means improved collaboration and minimized confusion, all while streamlining your processes.
No matter what size or industry your business functions in, there is a lot to gain from implementing the cloud into your everyday operations. Whether you struggle most with customer service management, are growing faster than you anticipated or are facing other challenges, the cloud can positively impact your business.
