The Top 3 Ways Cloud Computing Helps Businesses

Cloud computing has taken the business world by storm, fulfilling so many needs and simplifying as many processes. If you’ve been on the fence about incorporating the cloud into your IT infrastructure, you should know a few of these benefits to help you make your choice.

Cost Efficiency
Let’s face it, when you’re running a business, cost is a factor in every decision you have to make. Leveraging the cloud for any of a variety of purposes can help you to trim some expenses and make some others stretch a little further. A cloud setup provides the ability to scale your resources to match your needs, ensuring that you aren’t paying for more than you need. This simplifies your budget, and may help free up some capital to invest in other business needs.

Multiple Purposes
While the cloud is most famously associated with storage, it has the capability to serve your business in other ways as well. For instance, the cloud can host your software solutions for you as a part of a Software as a Service agreement. In these cases, any time there are improvements made and a new version is available, your solutions will be upgraded immediately.

Alternatively, the cloud can be used to facilitate a backup and disaster recovery strategy. By housing a backup of your data in an offsite cloud environment, it will be safe should some calamity damage your in-house infrastructure. In these cases, you can even virtualize your systems and run them directly from the cloud to preserve productivity while the office is repaired.

Finally, we return to storage, as it relates to the collaborative benefits to be had with the cloud. By storing business files and data in the cloud, you and your employees can share access and work together to achieve your shared company goals--whether or not you’re anywhere near each other.

Security
Your data is undeniably precious to your business, and as a result, it must be protected from threats from all sides, both external cyber crime and internal user error. Using the cloud permits you to keep your most sensitive data accessible on a need-to-know basis, and allows you to wipe a device in the hands of someone who doesn’t need to know, if need be.

If you want to use the cloud to accomplish these things, reach out to Washington Works at 301-571-5040.