Server to Cloud. What are you gaining from the switch?
As the world starts to move more towards keeping everything on the cloud, the question arises as to if making the change is really worth it. Cloud EconomicsThe cloud offers many benefits to companies that are trying to maintain a competitive edge. One of the largest benefits that a company can get out of most cloud services is that they usually offer maintenance for your cloud account. With this added maintenance companies do not have to worry about maintaining their own servers so they can save money by not having to put someone in charge of that. This also allows them to focus their resources on other things besides keeping their information safe and keeping the servers running. The maintenance does usually cost extra money but this can be rationalized by reminding yourself of the money that you will be saving by not having a team in charge of your servers.
Cloud ElasticityA second benefit that users receive when they are working from the cloud is that depending on what type of product you are working with, you can work from any computer as long as you use the clouds portal. This allows companies to be very flexible in a market that demands that. This means that if you sent someone across seas to present your product to a bunch of investors and they see something that they want changed, then you can access your information through the cloud and change it for them right there. Having access to your information anywhere at any time means that your employees can also work at their own pace since this will allow them to work on their projects from home and on the go. Other companies have tried to make it easy for their employees to work from wherever they are so if a company doesn't have this, then they are falling very far behind their competitors.
Easier, more cost effective growthAnother benefit of switching to the cloud is that unlike having your own servers, you can create new instances of your server. With your own server you eventually deal with the issue of it being slowed down by all the information that you have stored. This means that even though you won't notice significant differences in speed between the cloud and the server at first, they both will slow down over time from use. The difference is that when you are hosting the server the only way you will get that speed back is by completely erasing everything on the server. With the cloud you can just create a new instance of your server to work off of and it will work as fast as new.
Disaster RecoveryThe biggest benefit of using the cloud over the server is that if make a catastrophic error then you don’t have to worry about losing everything on the cloud like you do on your own server. When working on the cloud, you do not have all of your information saved to one server, rather in the case of the cloud, all of your information is spread across multiple servers. In the case of information loss, you will not lose everything on the cloud. If you were working on your own servers and all of a sudden they got erased then everything you had is gone. With the cloud you will only lose a chunk of your data. A company will not be able to handle anything as catastrophic as losing their information and the cloud offers the protection that you need to keep that from happening. In this competitive market a company cannot allow themselves to fall behind their competition and the only way to ensure that they survive is by having the best technology they can buy. |