How can Cloud help your business?

How cloud technology can help you address virtually every business objective

The growth of cloud technology over the last few years has been phenomenal. Vendor revenue for public cloud grew to $80bn in 2015, up from $25bn in 2012 — and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. By 2025, revenue is likely to stand at $493bn.

The reason for this kind of rapid growth is quite clear: cloud helps businesses to address their objectives. But when the internet is awash with technical information about how cloud works, what the different deployment methods are, and what you need to look for in a provider, it’s difficult to know where to start when you’re just getting on board with the technology.

Here are the numerous different ways cloud can help to deliver against key business objectives:

Growth

On-site IT can hold you back as a business. It’s expensive and time consuming to purchase and manage new hardware, and it takes up valuable space in your office. But with cloud, when you grow as a business, there’s nothing to stand in the way because all the physical hardware is taken care of, so you can quickly and easily add new people to teams with the tools they need.

Agility

Every business experiences some sort of unexpected demand every now and then. Cloud gives you the ability to access extra services quickly on the fly when you need them most, and then when you’re done, you can give them up — and only pay for what you use.

Contact centres, for example, are prime candidates for experiencing periods of unexpected demand. If a natural disaster happens, and an insurance company’s contact centre is flooded with abnormal levels of calls, the management can quickly and easily set up new seats for temporary agents.

Mobility

Work today is fast becoming a thing you do, not a place you go. Today’s workers expect to be able to work on trains, from home, at airports, in hotel rooms — in virtually any location where they can get an internet connection. What’s more, they want to work across tablets, smartphones and laptops, just in the same way they operate across their own personal devices.

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 provides you with a way to ensure that all employees remain productive, wherever they’re working and whatever device they use. 

Disaster recovery / business continuity

Disasters happen, but the risk of not being able to work because your IT is down is not worth taking. The cost of doing nothing and suffering a severe outage will almost always be more than the cost of an effective cloud-based disaster recovery solution.

Cloud ensures that if your sites are knocked out by, say, freak weather conditions, you’re still able to access your servers — and if you combine disaster recovery with mobility, your employees don’t have to come to the office, but work from home instead.