Cloud is still a hot topic of conversation for businesses. It is no longer a question of whether businesses use cloud solutions, but which cloud solutions they use. Why? Because cloud solutions are easier and cheaper to set up than legacy solutions, and far more agile. You don’t need to maintain, back up and update cloud services on your own premises. This is all taken care of for you by your cloud provider. And because you usually pay a low monthly fee for cloud solutions, it isn’t cost prohibitive to move to the latest, greatest provider for your application.
Many cloud services also offer custom made apps for various devices, from the humble PC or Mac, to tablets or smart phones – making them easy to use wherever and whatever you’re doing. This also allows businesses to offer BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to employees – saving the business expense on infrastructure and allowing the employee to use the hardware they are familiar with, whilst the data remains in the hands of the business. A simple account or password change removes access from an ex-employee’s own device.
Typical cloud services currently employed by many businesses today include online backup and synchronising solutions, accounting packages and Customer Relationship Management tools, but can be extended to more comprehensive solutions like hiring of compute clusters by the hour for intense processing of data to hosting your entire servers or even desktops in the cloud – allowing easy access to the same familiar desktop on any device.
Australian small to medium businesses are some of the fastest adopters of cloud solutions, which has allowed many to reduce the complexity of day to day tasks using some of the most progressive solutions available today. This is allowing smaller businesses to both compete and respond more quickly to changes in modern business environments, where disruptive innovation can and does put businesses that are too large or slow to adapt out of business surprisingly quickly.