Why Have So Many Businesses Moved to the Cloud?

Your business can’t afford to experiment with risky IT solutions—but it also can’t afford to be left behind.

How can you tell if the cloud market has reached the tipping point? How can you tell when cloud solutions have become stable and cost-effective enough that they are the more prudent choice?

There are several advantages to cloud solutions, and the maturing market reveals more advantages each day. According to a Harvard Business Review report that David Linthicum cites on InfoWorld, cloud platforms can streamline management responsibilities. Linthicum continues:

What’s significant about this finding is that it’s in a mainstream business journal, and not from yours truly or other cloud pundits. It means the cloud has likely crossed the chasm between IT promises and actual results, and now produces real value for the business. Most important, the businesses know it.

In fact, Small Business Trends says there is a rising number of risks for not moving to the cloud. So, the time to make a move is on the horizon.

But how can your business make a “move” rather than a “leap?”

The key is: You need to understand the benefits that a cloud solution offers, then you need to choose an approach that maximizes those benefits while managing the risks.

Maximizing the Benefits

Cloud solutions can offer a host of benefits, depending on the size and nature of your business. Even small and medium-sized businesses can recognize the value of:

• controlled stability for operating costs: When you no longer have to worry about asset lifecycles and hardware issues, it’s easier to budget for your annual needs.
• reduced facility costs: Data centers take room—and cooling, and maintenance, and then an expansion means more of everything. If you don’t have to maintain your own data center, you don’t have to house your own data center. You can let someone else worry about all of that.
• reduced facility risk: Maintaining your own physical data center is also a security risk—with every access badge, you introduce another person who understands your data and how it might be sold. Hosting your data in a cloud data center reduces your physical access risk significantly.
• disaster recovery: Cloud solutions are engineered to provide complete backups and almost immediate recovery. Even if you have a complete backup of your on-premise solution, the restoration process can mean a lot of work hours, a long wait, and a lot of lost business.
• agile infrastructure: Hardware platforms are designed to deliver—and when you change your infrastructure, or evolve your business, you can discover that your hardware requires significant changes or updates to meet your new requirements.

Computer Medic On Call can help you achieve steady and predictable operating costs, while reducing your facility costs and security risks. Computer Medic On Call can also help you engineer and activate your disaster recovery solution. And our infrastructure design specialists can help you take advantage of cloud flexibility to evolve your systems as business continues to change.

We understand both sides of the equation—technical features and business benefits. We help a range of businesses save money with cloud solutions every week.

We also understand what can go wrong. We know that not every cloud solution is a success, and we the know the risks that must be managed.

Managing the Risks

Many businesses are concerned about the security of moving to the cloud. In response, many solutions offer robust and dynamic security on the cloud.

But the biggest danger is sometimes in between—during migration.

It’s at that point that data can be most vulnerable. During any transfer, data is at risk of being stolen. During normal daily transactions, that’s usually a risk for a few records, or perhaps a few hundred records. If someone taps into the data migration for your complete system, though, they have every record you own.

Maintech cloud security helps to ensure that your data is protected at every step of the way—and our solution architects have a wide range of knowledge, which means we can reduce the total number of people who have access to your data.

To talk about making a cloud solution cost-effective and secure for your business, contact us today.