Cloud Computing Advantages
There are quite a number of advantages which can be sourced from the cloud, including Big Data innovations which can use IoT-enabled devices to help inform and streamline operations, as well as app development solutions that can be deployed across multiple branches.
Not least among such advantages are subsequent infrastructural savings, time consolidation, and the ability to expand operations profitably. These will be explored in brief here, but a cursory study of cloud development immediately communicates the effectiveness of this new tech innovation.
Substantial Resource Conservation
First, consider savings. You don’t have to buy an on-site server array to compose a localized data center. The larger your operations, the more cloud computing saves you. Because with a data center, you don’t just have the cost of servers, space, shipping, installation, maintenance and upgrades, you’ve got the cost of staff and backup, too.
You can basically triple the cost of servers. Because if you’ve got five of them they’ll probably cost you around $20k to purchase, transport, install, and maintain (minimum). Then you’re going to pay at least that much for the on-site IT staff who are necessary in their maintenance, and you can add a third $20k installment for the backup solution.
Meanwhile, with cloud computing you can get all the same computational utility through an outsourced solution at a monthly fee. Even if you’re paying $2k a month for such a solution, you’re still saving about $36k a year over the above-described scenario. In five years, that’s a $180,000 savings. Plus, you don’t have to pay for upgrades.
The Two-To-Five Year Itch
If your business is going to stay competitively viable, it means upgrading systems between every two and five years, dependent upon how integral tech operations are to your organization. If, for example, you’re a telemarketing agency, you can probably pinch the pennies involved in procuring tech such that a data center lasts five years.
But toward the end of that five years, things are going to get full of lag. It’s rather like preserving a late-model vehicle to 300,000 or 400,000 miles. Yeah, you can do it; but it’s going to be some work, and what you spend in keeping a car running that long may just as well have been devoted to another vehicle entirely.
Meanwhile, with cloud computing solutions, upgrades happen automatically on the part of the cloud provider. It’s their prerogative to continuously upgrade operations in order that they remain competitive. So you don’t have to spend tens of thousands every several years obtaining new systems.
And, best of all, you need not see any security lapses. Most important data can be consolidated to a few localized server systems for a tenth of the cost involved in maintaining a system-wide data center servicing one or multiple branches. You can have your cake, and eat it too. And all these things before solutions like VoIP are even discussed.
UCaaS And VoIP
UCaaS stands for “Unified Communication as a Service”, and refers to things like VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, which is one of many innovations TransBeam.com notes is contributing to: “An increasing number of enterprise companies across many verticals…beginning to see…benefits of applying cloud-based unified communications.”
With VoIP, businesses can cut out the telecommunications middle man calling up with decals of the “AT&T” variety. Instead of paying the phone company, businesses can just lump that bill in with their internet and get the same utility at a fixed rate that doesn’t fluctuate on a monthly basis.
For this reason the big telecom companies have begun to feature VoIP solutions, but the whole point is consolidation, so they’re not winning in that contest. When a local MSP can provide the same through the cloud, why pay two bills? Cloud computing is consolidating not just infrastructural efficiency, but the costs involved in operation.
