-This article was last updated on 25 March 2022-
The global pandemic has changed the working environments for millions of people who turned their living room spaces into makeshift home offices to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. With the new shift to homeworking, the demand for cloud-based services went through the roof. Figures published by the Synergy Research Group have revealed that the spending in Q1 in 2020 for cloud infrastructure services has increased by 37% compared to the same time the previous year. The market leader is still Amazon with a share of 32% followed by Microsoft with 18%.
In this blog article we discuss why cloud technology is the now and how your business can benefit from it.
What Exactly is Cloud Technology?
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The term cloud technology still sounds scary to some people, but it shouldn’t. Simply, “the cloud’ is a series of computers and software housed outside of your physical environment that you use to help you achieve your goals and meet requirements within your technology needs. If you’ve ever needed more storage within your internal network or wanted to share a big file with someone outside of your organisation and used a service like Dropbox or Google Drive, you’ve experienced cloud technology.
In this example, you used a service provided by an outside source, and you used their computers to accomplish a task; this is the basic principle of cloud computing.
How Does it Work?
As technology improves and things become more secure and affordable, more and more services move to the cloud. You can setup an entire organisation’s technology infrastructure for very little investment, while relying on cloud technologies to do the heavy lifting.
Things like accounting software, graphic development tools, backup and disaster recovery tools, and of course email services, are all available to you and your business for a fraction of the cost you might pay to house and manage them internally, thanks to the cloud. These reduced costs that cloud computing offers helps companies manage their expenses.
You can create a more agile and accessible business when you utilise cloud computing. It is extremely costly to setup the proper type of network that will support a large number of business-related tasks via hardware and applications, but there are large organisations that already have the assets you need, and often they’ll offer it to you for a fixed monthly rate. Since the cloud operates via the web, you’ll have access to and control of your mission critical technology anytime, anywhere making it very reliable and manageable.
Why is it Useful?
Whatever device you use to store your information on has a chance of crashing. Unless you’re very tech savvy and back up your data often, chances are you’re at risk of losing it. Using a third-party cloud service reduces the chances of this happening dramatically. This means that even if one location is compromised or even your own personal computer is attacked, your data still exists somewhere else, virtually inaccessible to anyone but you. (And whoever you choose to share it with.)
Another feature of cloud technology is cross-collaboration. As the global pandemic has shown, the traditional office set up has shifted, giving way to remote workforces and virtual meetings as the new norm. From February to April 2020, the video conferencing tool Zoom reported $328 million in revenue, compared to $122 million in the same period the previous year.
Many cloud services offer cross-collaboration, where multiple users or groups have access to the same information and data and may modify it at the same time. This may be more efficient and less time consuming than each person working on their own piece of a project and combining the results at the end. Cross-collaboration hence helps manage expenses as it leads to reduced costs. Furthermore, voice and video calls over the internet allow for ease of communication.
