The Rise in Cloud is Astronomical!

The growth in cloud adoption has risen at an astronomical rate. Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18% in 2017 t0 $246.8B up from $209.2B in 2016 with Cloud computing projected to increase from $67B in 2015 to $162B in 2020.

Companies are increasingly moving to the cloud and the full transition seems almost a foregone conclusion, the question just seems to be when this will be.

“Why would I move to cloud, I am fine with my current system?”

Well the key benefits from cloud that you simply cannot get in the same way with a traditional on premises phone system are as follows:

Growth

It is no secret that on-site IT and comms can hold you back as a business. It is expensive for a start and it also takes up valuable office space. Not only that it is incredibly time consuming to maintain the hardware, there is a lot more room for faults and errors and then if something goes wrong and you require a call out this can significantly affect your business preventing it from running at the level your customers have come to expect.

Cloud on the other hand eliminates these pain points by securely storing your data off site. This means maintenance call outs are gone, space is saved, costs can be afforded to usage but most importantly, as your business grows you can scale it accordingly to ensure your needs are met quickly and efficiently. Cloud is the solution that facilitates growing businesses because there is no physical hardware to stand in your way. Furthermore, with minimal investment you can increase productivity through unifying your communications into one streamlined system.

Agility

You know your business better than anyone else, you know the trends, you know when you need to allocate more resources however the wider market is out of your control. In seasonal businesses this can be easier to predict however every now and then there can be an unexpected demand that you need to be ready for. With a traditional On-Prem system you are stuck within the limits of the hardware, for example you could have adopted a large powerful system to account for this whose capabilities lay dormant for months on end – regardless of usage you are still going to pay the same.

Cloud on the other hand affords you the ability to pay for only what you use. This means you can quickly add or remove extra services when the demand calls for it and you aren’t paying for unnecessary features for the remainder of the year.

Mobility

The days of being chained to your desk for hours on end seem to becoming somewhat obsolete as remote working is increasingly encouraged - work today is fast becoming a thing you do, not a place you go. Businesses are realising that importance of offering their people the flexibility to work in a way that suits them, to find the home/life balance and increase morale in the workplace through trusting their staff.

The global growth in employee mobility is continuing at pace and the world will see 1.75 billion mobile workers by 2020, accounting for 42.0% of the global workforce.Cloud technology allows mobility that an on premises system simply cannot. Through the cloud, employees can remain productive no matter where they are and whatever device they are using. They can access your systems securely whether they are at home, on a train, in an airport or on the other side of the world.

Disaster recovery / Resilience

Thankfully major disasters are a rarity but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen and surely any percentage of risk that you are left unable to work because your IT is down is not worth taking? A severe outage can seriously impact your business and could take weeks, months or even years to recover from. Having a physical on-premises IT and Comms systems leaves the risk in your hands, however making the move to a cloud-based system not only removes this risk, the cost of implementing an effective cloud-based disaster recovery solution will almost always pale in comparison to the impact of a disaster to your on premises IT and Comms systems.

Adopting a cloud system ensures that if disaster strikes you are still able to access your servers, if the disaster is so bad that it prevents you from even making it into the office you employees can work from home. Cloud can help mitigate the impact of disaster and allows minimal disruption to the service to your customers.

Making The Switch

“OK, that all makes sense and sounds good, but I am worried about making the switch, all of my systems are on premises and I am worried about losing control”

Of course, making widespread changes to critical systems can be a somewhat daunting prospect however there are a number of options which means the transitions can be as gradual or as fast as you want – after all, we recognise there is not a “one size fits all” communications solution.

A common solution is through adoption of a hybrid system that utilises aspects of both on premise and cloud to ease the transition. That being said, cloud doesn’t have to be hard. If you find the right solution and balance for you, making the move should be smooth and you should start to reap the benefits instantaneously. A key benefit that many of our customers have found is the ability to unify their communications into a single piece, this improves efficiency, increases accountability and allows for a more cohesive offering for you customers.