Why Your Business Needs The Cloud

From a business perspective, data is king. Before computers, relying on physical data storage was the only option and things weren’t much easier after computers either. Since the 50s, businesses have been looking for ways to store their computer data and have come up with plenty of creative solutions. From virtual machines allowing more than one OS to function at a time to Google Docs, it wasn’t up until 2006 that cloud computing really took off. Today, 93% of organizations use the could in some form, and 42% of them derive 50% or more of their business through cloud-based apps.

For many users of the cloud, it’s a convenient means to store data, like photos and documents, and to share them easily between devices and other users. iCloud is a popular platform for this with more than 250 million active users. Businesses use the cloud differently to accelerate growth, however. By 2020, global spending on public cloud computing will more than double from $67 million in 2015 to $162 billion, at a rate of six times faster than spending on IT. Cloud-savvy businesses earn 2.3 times more revenue than their less savvy counterparts and are more likely to create a long-term competitive advantage by using the cloud. Finance executives say the using the cloud reduces operational costs up to 20%, sometimes even more. AWS, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure dominate the public cloud service market at 36% and 30% respectively, competing with Google Cloud and Rackspace.

Cloud computing can be as simple or as complicated as one would like, but for business basics, there are three effective paths to take with the cloud, each with its own benefits. Public and private servers are exactly what they sound like; public servers exist with all hardware, software, and its infrastructure owned and operated by a c loud provider, whilst private servers are used, organized, and managed for one business only. Hybrid cloud computing stands out as a healthy mixture of both public and private servers. Combining on side infrastructure with public clouds nearly 50% of businesses using the cloud prefer the hybrid approach.

For smart business leaders, understanding the value of streamlining operations while reducing costs is the key to growth; it’s business 101. The power behind driving business cloud investments comes down to lowering costs, replacing on-premise tech, enabling business continuity, and most importantly, building a scalable platform for data management that grows alongside the business. When tech grows exponentially, as it does in our current year, managing and updating hardware, tech, and infrastructure becomes more and more of an obstacle. When implementing cloud servers, IT maintenance costs go down, time investments go down, and some services offer constantly updated enterprise-grade equipment as new tech becomes available. Working with the cloud for business harnesses analytics for decision-making, and transforms your IT department from an upkeep department into a powerful revenue generator.

What drives your business to the cloud? Take a look at this infographic for more on the rise of cloud computing, its humble beginnings on the mainframe, and how it can be leveraged to push your business forward.