How Cloud Can Enhance Your Business Efficiency

The competitive business landscape gives second chances to no one. Therefore, businesses always need to be on their toes to stay one step ahead of their competitors. One of the major factors to gain a competitive advantage is optimizing your business efficiency. Simply put, business efficiency means getting the word done in less time, effort, hassles, and revenue.

Nowadays, various advanced technologies, such as AI, offer solutions to enhance your business efficiency. However, a common factor among them is that they are developed on the cloud infrastructure. Cloud is a versatile, robust, secure, and cost-efficient platform that helps businesses achieve optimum efficiency.

Let’s check out how.

Promotes WFH Culture

As a professional, attending client meetings, conferences, or seminars is a part of an employee’s daily operations. In addition, employees after the COVID pandemic prefer working from home to maintain the work-life balance. However, if the entire IT infrastructure is hosted in-house, they must be in the office to accomplish most tasks.

Cloud computing empowers you to carry out business operations from remote locations. As your data and apps are hosted on remote cloud servers, you only need an access device, such as your phone, laptop, or tablet, and a stable internet connection to access them. Consequently, it enables you to facilitate a work-from-home culture. Employees can work from the comfort of their homes and still get a desktop-like experience.

Facilitates Data Analysis

Most successful businesses today are utilizing the capabilities of new-age technologies, such as AI and blockchain, to get valuable insights into their business process. These technologies combined enable companies to carry out predictive analysis, sales forecasting, etc. by analyzing huge amounts of data. However, one challenge with implementing these technologies is that they require extensive computing power and storage.

Deploying such an advanced IT infrastructure in-house is not economically feasible. Cloud computing offers a High-Performance Computing environment for your business operations. On the cloud platform, you can get any computing power (vCPU) and storage for extensive data processing. This empowers you to integrate all the mentioned technologies into your business process. Consequently, you can make effective business strategies for future growth and risk management.

Enhances Collaboration

In today’s global business scenario, teammates from all over the world need to collaborate to share ideas, data, and updates. Before the advent of cloud computing, businesses accomplished all these tasks through emails or phone calls. This caused numerous challenges, like data discrepancies and delayed communication, hammering the efficiency of business operations.

Cloud computing offers a platform for businesses, where employees from any country can collaborate easily with each other. For instance, the video conferencing applications that enable employees to have real-time meetings remotely are all built on the cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, the employees can view, modify, and share data simultaneously, eliminating the need to send multiple data file versions through emails.

Elasticity

You need to regularly upgrade or downgrade your IT infrastructure, depending on the business growth, market conditions, events, and sales figures. For instance, let’s assume you have acquired a project with a timeline of two months. For that period, you would require more storage and processing capabilities.

However, when the project ends, you would want to revert to the original setup. In the case of a conventional IT infrastructure, this is impossible as you have already bought and set up the servers. The cloud infrastructure offers high elasticity in your business process. Therefore, if you want to upgrade your IT resources, it can be done instantly by the cloud service provider.

Moreover, if, after a certain period, you want to revert to the original configuration, it can done too. This elastic nature of the cloud relieves you from the hassles of scaling the IT infrastructure.

Optimizes Data Security

Data security is paramount to all businesses, be it startups, SMBs, or enterprises. Any data breach event can cause an irreparable dent in the company’s finances and reputation. However, given the current versatility and fatality of the cyber threat landscape, implementing a robust security infrastructure on your premises is expansive and complicated.

Firstly, you must deploy security safeguards for every type of cyber threat, be it a phishing or DDOS attack. Secondly, you have to train employees in the data security best practices and risk management protocols. Moreover, you must comply with the data security regulations, such as GDPR.

Cloud computing offers a comprehensive data security solution for your business process. The best cloud service providers deploy a multi-level security infrastructure to ensure efficient data monitoring, threat detection and mitigation, and risk management. For this, they implement security safeguards at various levels, such as physical, network, endpoint, and admin. Some major security safeguards include data encryption, network monitoring, multi-factor authentication, access controls, OS patching, antivirus, and antivirus, among others.

Moreover, the service providers are certified with the latest regulations and ensure compliance. Migrating your business process to the cloud frees employees from all data security concerns, enhancing the business process.

Offers High ROI

For businesses, especially startups, and SMBs, setting up an in-house IT infrastructure can be quite expensive. The costs associated with an IT infra is multifold. Firstly, you must bear the cost of buying expensive servers and systems. Secondly, cooling and power equipment must be installed to ensure their smooth functioning.

Thirdly, you need to set up an in-house IT team for maintenance. Cloud offers you a cost-effective solution to run your business. As all your business data and apps are hosted on the cloud, there is no need for an extensive in-house IT infrastructure. The only cost you incur is the monthly or annual bill you pay to the cloud provider.

Guarantees 24/7 Availability

Any temporary disruptions in your daily operations can hamper the overall business efficiency. However, disruptions can happen due to various reasons, such as power issues, accidents, or natural disasters. In some cases, the downtime can last for days. The cloud service providers offer 24/7 availability of your business process. The Good ones guarantee an uptime of 99.99 percent in their SLA, which means a maximum of 6 minutes of downtime in a year.

To achieve this uptime, the cloud providers deploy business continuity and disaster recovery plans (BCDR), where they replicate your entire business process on redundant servers and data centers. Therefore, even if one data center location is affected by a disaster, you can continue working.

Offers Technical Support

Whether hardware failure or login issues, IT issues are frequent in daily operations. To overcome these issues, every office must deploy a dedicated IT department. However, in today’s global business scenario, offices are open 24/7. Consequently, the IT team must also be available anytime an issue occurs. It requires an extensive IT team, leading to more operational expenses.

After migrating to the cloud, the cloud service provider takes care of all the IT-related issues. The competent cloud service providers offer 24/7/365 customer support via call, chat, email, or chatbots. Hence, it minimizes your in-house IT operations.

Plan your Cloud Migration

Various benefits of cloud computing help you increase your business efficiency. However, before moving to the cloud, you must plan the migration carefully. The first step to cloud migration is to analyze your existing IT infrastructure. The next vital step is to choose the best cloud provider for your business.

There is a plethora of cloud service providers offering diverse solutions. However, you must find the right provider based on your business size, industry type, and budget. We offer a 7-day free trial of our advanced cloud solution so you can get a first-hand experience of our services before deciding to move to the cloud.