Cloud Can Cover Most of Your Business Needs

The traditional computing structure has been under siege by cloud computing for the past several years. More businesses than ever are seeing the value in cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure, and while that may not be a huge surprise, the perceptions that the cloud can solve any of your organizational computing problems depend largely on the needs of that endeavor. Today, we will take a look at successful small business cloud strategies and tell you why they find success.

Cloud for File Sharing
File sharing is the number one reason any small business moves some of their computing to the cloud. Cooperation is essential to small business success, and a cloud-based file sharing solution gives any small business near-ubiquitous access to data. This access allows work to be completed from multiple locations, giving the small businesses great benefit as it makes them competitive with larger organizations who have more people and more resources. This allows small businesses to take charge over more of the market than ever before, increasing revenues and promoting business growth.

Cloud for Communications
Another avenue a lot of small businesses are taking is using cloud-hosted communications services. Like many other cloud-hosted applications, it can save a company quite a bit of money switching to a VoIP system or public-cloud-hosted email solution. What about functionality? Cloud-hosted VoIP is actually a great solution for any organization looking for a feature-rich phone platform and wants to do away with their traditional phone bill. With feature-rich packages, any organization can get the customized VoIP solution that fits in their budget and provides them options for messaging, conferencing, and enterprise-level phone services.

Hosted email can provide a lot of benefits, as well. It eliminates the costs associated with the hosting and management of the email server, while providing users enhanced functionality that includes added message encryption, instant messaging integration, and much more.

Cloud for Storage
When you think about cloud storage, the first thing that must come to mind are the hundreds of gigabytes that many cloud storage providers just give away to anyone that signs up for their services; and the affordable options individual users can explore to gain a substantial amount of cloud storage space. The issue for small businesses is that public cloud hosted storage facilities don’t provide them the control over their data that most of them would like. This is why you see organizations building their own private cloud inhouse or collocate it to a data center where they have full control over the data.

The benefits of cloud storage are that data is accessible from anywhere, giving a business increased mobility that can definitely benefit them over time. The perceived lack of security that some organizations point to is largely in how their employees utilize the cloud interface, not the cloud environment itself, as it is likely highly encrypted. Many organizations have begun to use cloud storage interfaces for redundancy, making cloud-based backup and recovery solutions a fairly attractive option to secure backup files.

Cloud for Security
Nowadays, security is the top line-item for about any IT administrator. Since there is an abundance of threats every organization has to be cognizant of, it only makes sense that cybersecurity firms start offering their comprehensive network and cybersecurity services. In utilizing a SEaaS system IT administrators can leverage some of today’s most potent security solutions from the Internet. This provides a full cache of services to IT administrators.

Once you ascertain what threats you are up against, utilizing a Security as a service software will allow you to remote into any machine and set up high-end security services that can be customized to your organization's needs. These security services go a long way toward keeping software and hardware up to date with latest security permissions. There are options for anti-malware, content filtering, spam blocking, and more, making cloud security a good investment for the organization that depends on the Internet for their business.

The cloud has expanded to include almost any type of computing you can think of. For your business, it can be the answer to all questions your risk assessments have presented. For more information about hosted solutions and utility computing, call the IT professionals at Preferred today at 708-781-7110.