Sunshine is overrated. For many modern businesses, it’s all about clouds — or more specifically, the cloud. Hosted services — online applications, servers, voice over IP solutions, access controls and surveillance systems — offer plenty of perks for the businesses that use them. These hosted systems contribute to more efficient, flexible operations, giving organizations quick, convenient access to powerful new technologies without bloating IT budgets.
Let’s take a look at some of the unique benefits inherent to hosted services — and find out why it’s good to have your head in the clouds!
Convenience
Need to access your server while on a business trip to Beijing? Grant a new employee quick, convenient access to a wide range of applications? Implement a testing environment for the new site you’re developing? The cloud makes it possible to handle all of these tasks without difficult software installations and configurations. Meanwhile, because hosted tools reside on the cloud, they’re easy to access — regardless of where you’re working today.
Cost Savings
Although cloud technology is convenient, it might not be as widely adopted if it didn’t present serious cost savings for the businesses using it. On-premise equipment can quickly drain IT spending, particularly if you’re paying to maintain and upgrade hardware and software yourself. With hosted services like a cloud server, not only do you avoid the costs of equipment and maintenance, you also pay significantly less for disk space. For many businesses, that provides the agility they need to run lean, efficient operations.
Scalability
Markets move quickly these days. Thanks to the internet, whole industries can be disrupted and completely upended in the span of a few months, presenting opportunities for those who can act quickly. It’s imperative that your business has the technological capabilities to strike while the iron is hot. With less capital tied up in equipment, your organization has the budget to respond to new technical challenges and to implement innovations quickly. Scalable, flexible IT infrastructure gives you the ability to scale up rapidly when you need more technological muscle and downscale quickly when you see lean times in the future.
Access to Enterprise Technologies
For small businesses, it may not be cost effective to install the necessary infrastructure to leverage certain services like VoIP. Hosted VoIP, however, offers diverse organizations access to powerful communications systems, without costly, burdensome onsite solutions — regardless of their size. That seriously levels the technological playing field for SMBs competing against enterprise companies.
Improved Physical Security
Storage requirements for surveillance footage can quickly mushroom out of control, particularly if you’re relying on pixel-heavy files from a high-quality camera. Hosted surveillance gives you the ability to capture and store surveillance footage for longer, without blowing your IT budget on disk space. After a security event, those extra months of footage could be incredibly useful to identify and locate suspects.
Disaster Recovery and Backups
In virtualized cloud environments, many assets — namely, your applications, data, and servers — are bundled together, which makes backups simpler and more convenient. Many hosted servers and applications offer backups as a matter of course, which can save time when recovering data during an equipment malfunction or security event. Data backups like these give you the confidence to handle certain cyber criminal events, such as a ransomware attack or data breach.
While cloud hosted solutions like these can certainly improve the performance and responsiveness of IT services, your decision to implement shouldn’t be made lightly. Hosted services require your due diligence to secure data and networks, since it’s much easier for criminals to gain access to online assets. At Taylored, we pride ourselves on building secure, convenient IT infrastructure solutions for diverse organizations with various technical needs. After all, there’s room in the cloud for every kind of business under the sun!