Empowering your workforce to do their jobs remotely is of vital short-term importance given the work-from-home mandates that are likely to be in place for a while. Taking advantage of online collaboration tools is a must.
Moving your internal applications to the cloud will also pay dividends—not only now, but also over the long term. Even after employees are no longer forced to work from home, setting up your business to run in the cloud will be essential—just in case a similar situation occurs. You won’t want your business to miss a beat and sputter while you take the time to deploy the necessary technologies to enable people to work remotely.
In addition to keeping your business moving while people work away from the office, your business can benefit over the long term by moving applications and your IT infrastructure to the cloud:
- Disaster Recovery – When information is stored on local servers, any interruption or data breach can destroy critical information forever. The cloud allows you to store valuable data in multiple data centers in different geographic areas. If one location is compromised, the others back you up. Users can connect to the failover site and you can preserve your data.
- IT Security - The cloud delivers up-to-the-minute security patches so you can always maintain a strong security posture in protecting applications and data. The cloud is also inherently safer than on-premises data centers. That’s because hackers tend to target on-premises data centers; they know the leading public cloud providers are managed by top security experts who wield the latest IT security technologies for defending against cybercrime.
- Sustainability - In the cloud, your applications and data are hosted by a platform provider who will make sure they perform optimally. That model is much easier for a business to sustain rather than running on-premises servers that must be purchased and deployed every couple of years and maintained continuously. On-premises, you’re also on the hook for power, cooling, and the physical space. Those worries go away when you move to the cloud.
- Cost Containment – The cloud frees your company from having to buy and maintain servers and paying people to manage and support the hardware on an on-going basis. The cloud essentially makes data management a pay-per-use arrangement. Instead of facing sunk capital costs and the depreciation of physical equipment, in the cloud you pay only for the amount of data you manage and the storage you use.
- Upgrades and Expansion – Software and hardware upgrades in the cloud occur automatically and are handled by your platform provider. The upgrades are so seamless, your internal team will hardly notice any changes in your day-to-day business. And as your business needs evolve, your computing resources can expand or contract as needed—without new expenditures on physical equipment.
Ready for the Next Time
Although the move to the cloud requires an adjustment, your business will gain a lot more agility in responding to customer needs. And your IT costs will turn into a predictable, known monthly operational expense—rather than unknown and sometimes unplanned capital expenses. More importantly, should the world ever face work-from-home mandates again, you’ll be ready.
For help with moving your business to the cloud, contact Western Computer today.
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