Cloud computing is critical to most businesses nowadays.
Very few organizations are still using local licenses installed on the computers sitting in their offices. It’s inefficient and wastes a lot of time installing and reinstalling software applications.
In the old days, when a server went down, a mad scramble ensued to find a replacement, which meant driving to a local distributor or having a supplier overnight it. If you needed to expand your horsepower, you had to physically secure the parts, take the machines down, and reinstall everything.
Cloud computing avoids all of those problems, and it saves time, money, space, energy, and other resources. It lets you scale up and down quickly, and costs a fraction of the amount of hosting your own internal servers on-site. Plus, cloud computing is more secure against cybercriminals and hackers.
Here are three benefits of cloud computing in today’s business climate.
Cloud Computing Saves Physical Space
Companies that need to house a lot of data or business applications often turn to an internal server room to store all that information.
Server rooms take up a lot of space. If a company needs to expand its server-room footprint, it must either convert nearby office space or find an entirely new space altogether. In some cases, a company may have to move completely just to accommodate the expanded computing power, or they lease additional office space elsewhere to hold the servers.
Server rooms also need their own separate cooling systems because the servers generate a lot of heat, sometimes using multiple AC units to cool the space. If one of those AC units goes down, the servers are in danger of overheating and dying, taking important data with it.
Cloud computing operations are kept in server farms in another part of the country, which means you don’t need extra space for your own server room. You can run a large-scale operation completely from a cloud computing system and never have a single server in your own office.
Cloud Computing Saves Money
A server room uses a lot of energy, not only because of the servers’ power consumption but also because of the cooling costs. Depending on the size and number of servers and cooling units, your server room could become a big part of your energy budget. The bigger the room, the more it costs.
In-house servers also require staff to operate and maintain them. That means hiring system administrators and network administrators. The more servers you add, the more IT staff you’ll need, which can get expensive.
You’ll also need to replace servers as they go bad, every three to five years. Servers can cost a few thousand dollars apiece, which means if you have to replace them all at once, that can get expensive (and disruptive).
With cloud computing, you don’t need to replace and update servers, your cloud provider does that for you. And you don’t need a large IT staff to maintain the servers, the cloud provider has that staff. Your cloud provider will also bear the energy costs and management of all the servers in their building.
Cloud Computing is Scalable
There are times when businesses need to process large amounts of data, but don’t have the computing horsepower to manage the task. Or the job is so large, it could take days and weeks.
The only solutions are to either wait until existing, overworked servers can complete the job or buy more servers. In the latter case, those extra servers will often sit unused until it’s time to process the data again, which could be once per quarter or even once per year.
Or an organization may grow and add new employees, which means buying extra servers to handle the increased data and extra business software. Computers have to be large enough to handle all of the new data and to run the resource-heavy applications on their computer.
With cloud computing, you can increase the server capacity temporarily and quickly, adding new capacity for a few dollars, and turning it off as soon as you’re finished. It’s ideal for cyclical and repeat tasks that only happen at peak times of the year.
You can also save money by buying smaller computers for your staff by running your biggest resource hogs, like ERP and wealth management software, to the cloud where employees can access it online, rather than bogging down their own computers.
Ultimately, cloud computing is a time saver, money saver, and energy saver. You can grow as your client base or your business grows, adding new processing power in a matter of minutes. Accutech’s Cheetah and CheetahGO solutions are cloud-based and can help you save over an in-house server operation. If you would like to learn more, request a free demo.
