Efficiency and cost reductions are something every business strives for in order to improve everyday business operations, but this can sometimes involve large upfront investments in cost saving strategies that give little reward. Cloud computing can offer a sustainable and long term strategy to increase organizational efficiency and cost management.
Here are 5 of the benefits cloud computing can offer including how migrating to the cloud can help your business.
1) Provision as necessary
As a business grows, it might look to scale up server usage as testing and development requirements increase. With cloud computing, this is made easy through provisioning more servers of the same size or larger servers if necessary. Equally, reducing server usage is made easy through scaling servers down.
The benefits of such scalability is that you only pay for the resources that your company uses, saving money that can be more efficiently used.
A critical mistake many organizations make is leaving unused servers switched on, and so they end up paying for server activity that they are not actually using. However with Cloud Machine Manager, you can turn servers off on-demand, ensuring you only pay for the server activity you use, generating huge cost savings. What’s more, you can then use these cost savings to reinvest in bigger and better servers as your business grows, effectively earning yourself a free upgrade. Not too shabby.
2) Reduced spending on infrastructure
One of the great things about cloud computing is that a business can avoid large investments in hardware and infrastructure. Rather than purchasing servers that take up space, take a while to be delivered and take even longer to configure, you can simply provision servers from cloud service providers off-site, saving money and time.
Another benefit of this is that cloud service providers are able to achieve huge economies of scale due to the large number of servers they have, meaning each server you provision is gained at a lower cost than if you purchase one in-house.
3) Improved accessibility
Cloud computing offers flexible working for users allowing them to work wherever and whenever they want across a variety of devices i.e. laptops, tablets etc (as long as they have an Internet connection and access to the cloud).
As part of the accessibility benefits, users can also easily share files and documents in the cloud, enabling teams to be more effective in their collaboration of projects, no matter the location of each individual team member.
4) Environmentally friendly
Moving to the cloud can help organizations save huge amounts of money in their energy bills as well as reduce their carbon footprint.
These benefits are achieved as an organization doesn’t need to invest in large machines, so you don’t need to spend money on running and maintaining this infrastructure. Instead, cloud service providers who house vast numbers of servers, are able to carefully control the temperature and humidity in server rooms to ensure servers can run at optimum performance.
Cloud service providers also run their infrastructure at more stable utilization levels compared to organizations employing in-house servers. So cloud service providers are able to perform the same tasks but using significantly fewer servers, achieving greater performance gains and more efficient server utilization. Ultimately, this helps to increase energy savings.
5) Cloud back-up and security
Losing a laptop with huge amounts of important data on it is a nightmare for businesses. But cloud computing offers great benefits in terms of ensuring your data does not get lost.
With your data stored in the cloud, you can gain access to it from any location and from any device, so even if a laptop is lost, it’s possible to access the data – all you need is an Internet connection.
Many cloud service providers use encryption, application-specific protection and server virtualization amongst other methods to keep data safe and reduce the chances of a data breach or loss of data.
So remember, 5 key benefits of cloud computing are;
- Provision as necessary – scale up or down server usage based on needs and only pay for what’s used
- Reduced spending on infrastructure – provision servers off-site and avoid the costs of purchasing and maintaining servers in-house
- Improved accessibility – as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access cloud servers from anywhere
- Environmentally friendly – save money and reduce your carbon footprint by taking advantage of cloud providers’ ability to run servers efficiently
- Cloud back-up and security – keep data safe in the cloud and access it anywhere
There are many tools that can help to reduce the costs and manage cloud servers, including Cloud Machine Manager (CMM). CMM uses scheduling and automation tools to give you control of when servers are switched on and off. The on-demand switch ensures that you are only billed for the time that your servers are actually being used. Try it out today risk free or see how much you could be saving with our savings estimator.
