Cloud computing has almost completely taken over the IT world for both individuals and businesses. At its root, it is simply the practice of using services, software, and even hardware that are hosted remotely. While it first seemed like there wouldn’t be a point in this, it has turned out that there are many significant benefits. This is why the practice has spread so widely over just the last few years. Here are some of the ways your business can use it to save money, improve security, and help prevent data loss:
Cloud Hosting
This replaces the old practice of using your own servers in the traditional way. Instead of running your own facility or physically placing servers in rented data center space, you set up an account at a cloud hosting provider. What makes this different from traditional server hosting is that the plans offer much more flexibility. It used to be that if you needed to change the amount of disk space or processing power your company used, you’d have to migrate to an entirely different machine. With cloud hosting, there is no such requirement. You just click the right buttons on your account screen and you’re done.
Cloud Computing – Software as a Service
This is likely the most popular form of cloud computing. Instead of buying software, you sign up for an account that gives you access to your desired program. What’s the point of this? Believe it or not, it’s not just to keep the money coming into the software companies. They provide many benefits for signing up, such as:
- Automatically applied updates
- The security power of a big software company
- Security against disaster-related data loss
- A stable operating environment for the software
Automatically applied updates make it so that you don’t have to go through downtime during the process. It’s all done on the company’s side, and they make sure that customers still have access while they handle the technical aspects.
Cloud service companies also have the money and technicians needed to ensure that the software and your data are as secure as possible. You won’t have to either try to figure out security settings for yourself or hope that your technician gets around to applying patches.
Disaster-related data loss is all but unheard of with SaaS. That’s because the provider will store your relevant data on its servers, which puts it out of range of any fires or other disasters that befall your physical location. For even more protection against data loss, you can easily download backups to your computers so that a disaster on the provider’s end won’t be able to get to it either. This way, at least one copy of your data will be available to you at all times.
The stability of the operating environment is something that is usually talked about by techies, but it’s very important. Many software crashes result from the fact that IT providers don’t know every possible environment that their software will be running on. By hosting it themselves, they only have to worry about one actual operating configuration: their own. It’s far easier to prevent crashes under these conditions.
Conclusion
With these benefits, it’s no wonder that cloud computing is popular in Los Angeles and is still growing every day. Popular corporate software dealing with things like accounting, other recordkeeping, word processing, and more are already offered in this format. Hardware, such as servers, PBX systems, and similar machines have also been moved to the cloud. Contact us to learn which of these offerings we think are worth using and to find out other cloud-based services that we suggest you adopt for your company.