Cloud solutions have become practically part of the infrastructure of many companies. Firms have already assessed their benefits: high performance, easy scalability, and most importantly – significant cost savings. The cloud is most often chosen by small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford to build their own infrastructure. Therefore, as an alternative, he uses cloud technology. Let’s find out if this solution is really necessary for companies and what benefits it has.
Features of business without cloud technology
The use of physical IT infrastructure is still the classic scheme for many companies. Organizations prefer to work “the old-fashioned way” because they are afraid of Kubernetes migration.
However, in today’s reality, this solution is difficult to call successful, because it has a number of obvious drawbacks. For example:
- Requires the purchase of operating systems and applications for every computer in the office.
- Periodically it is necessary to repair and service the machines.
- The competent operation of such an infrastructure is not without regular upgrades and the replacement of obsolete elements.
- IT specialist is required who will monitor the operation of equipment and troubleshoot.
That is, in fact, each computer becomes an object that requires constant investment. And it’s good if the office is small, which means that it doesn’t have many jobs. But medium-sized companies have trouble in this situation since the required budget for the maintenance and service of machines is many times greater.
It is possible to avoid such problems if you start using the cloud for at least part of your business processes. And the sooner the firm realizes this, the more money it will be able to save.
The peculiarities of cloud business
Cloud solutions for business allow for optimization of data storage and data exchange between employees. In this case, a company acquires new opportunities:
- Use of obsolete system units for terminal access to cloud storage.
- Reducing the cost of expensive server equipment.
- No expenses for infrastructure modernization.
- Reduced energy and rental costs.
- Increase and decrease infrastructure during peak times.
- Organization of remote work of employees.
- Reducing costs of the IT department (up to its complete reduction).
So, there are really many advantages of such a solution. However, many companies still postpone the adoption of cloud technology because business leaders have preconceptions about the use of the cloud. The main fear is related to data storage. In the early stages of development, cloud technology was not highly secure, so data leaks were not uncommon. Since then, however, there has been a major upgrade, and today’s cloud services are suitable even for the storage of sensitive information. For example, many banks and financial institutions have already switched to the cloud and use it to process large amounts of data.
Many owners of small and medium-sized businesses do not fully understand why they should use the cloud and what the difference between it and the physical IT infrastructure is. It’s important to understand that cloud services can often offer a unique set of tools and applications that are simply not available on physical hardware.
When arguing in favor of the cloud, there is another important factor to consider – rapid scalability. This factor is critical for small and medium-sized businesses related to e-commerce. For example, in peaks of user activity, there is a risk that the site will not cope with the load, and thus the company will incur heavy losses. With the cloud, it is possible to increase or decrease the performance of the infrastructure at any time, thereby preventing the crash of the site.
Conclusion
Many small and medium-sized companies who decide to optimize their IT infrastructure are afraid of the difficulties of moving to a cloud service. However, more often than not, these fears are unfounded. Most providers offer a seamless migration service that allows you to migrate from a physical server to a cloud server without interrupting current business processes. This service is suitable for high-loaded sites.
Also, it is not necessary to migrate the entire company to the cloud right away – most often, organizations try a new solution on a few employees or one department to make a decision on further complete migration.
