01/12/2015

A server crashing, causing loss of data and employees’ inability to work, it’s every big company’s nightmare.
It could be a reason why certain companies are making the switch to the Cloud. However, sometimes they don’t have a choice, for example when their infrastructure can no longer handle the Big Data.

Shifting to the Cloud, what is it exactly? Well, when in the past software applications and data were only stored in a local, company owned server, this is now possible in an external, online “Cloud”.
What this means is that companies are no longer required to make hefty investments in mandatory, extra data storage units. A cost that would otherwise be necessary, because of the amounts of Big Data they have to process in the contemporary day-to-day business.

Money saver

Cutting costs, that is what’s important nowadays. The cloud’s scalability allows companies to only pay for the storage they actually need, unnecessary spending is no longer an issue.
The IT-investments that laid a heavy burden on all companies in the past, are no longer an issue due to the fact that they don’t have to pay for their own infrastructure anymore.
At the same time, they are no longer required to hire a dedicated IT-staff to maintain said infrastructure, cloud-based services provide their own real-time maintenance & supervision.
Expensive desktops are also a relic of the past, cloud-based systems are lightweight and don’t require high-end PC’s to work with.


CloudCloudHome office

An item that was all too topical in the past week. Brussels-based companies were advising & requesting their employees to work from home due to the increased threat-level in the city.
Through the cloud, said employees were able to temporarily transform their living room in to an office, you can login from anywhere at any time in to the company’s network.

Increased security

Data is no longer stored on local hard drives, it’s safely kept in datacenters that require a high security clearance to enter. The odds of confidential information being tossed on to the web as a consequence of an employee going rogue, is reduced to a bare minimum.

Always available

An all too common phenomenon in small businesses, once something happens with their own, often only server, all productivity is instantly reduced to zero.
A server in a datacenter can of course, malfunction too. However, they have enough back-up servers and network administrators to reduce that downtime dramatically, meaning that when something does happen, it’s almost instantaneously resolved.

Expensive maintenance is history

We’ve come full circle, cutting costs. Every year, it’s an incredibly time-& money consuming process, renewing software licenses. Updates often requiring manual interference. Through the cloud, updates are usually pushed automatically by the provider, saving both company time and money because none of their own resources have to be enabled.

Jan de Jong