How Can Cloud Services Adoption Benefit Your Business?

Cloud based services are available in various forms and at different levels.  Just about anyone from a home consumer all the way up to a multinational corporation can purchase, or consume for free, cloud services.  But just like anything else, why should anyone use cloud services?  Is all the hype really substantive?  I would like to propose that cloud based services provide a benefit that is sometimes difficult to recognize.  I want to share with you exactly how businesses can benefit from cloud services adoption.

There are particular aspects of operating a business that that are vital to the revenue cycle. One of the them is uptime. Uptime is measured by the amount of time a businesses systems are accessible to customers. If your customers can’t access your systems to purchase goods or services, your business can’t make money. Cloud services can help to eliminate the negative impact downtime can have to your sales by increasing the number of available zones your business systems can operate in. Most cloud service vendors have zones across the world. This helps to provide constant availability. Which in turn, increases uptime.  How much would you be willing to pay for constant availability? More importantly, how much would it cost you to ensure that kind of availability for your business?

Another aspect of business operations that is a direct benefit of cloud services adoption is disaster recovery (DR).  A cloud service implementation could be used as part of an overall DR plan.  This plan could couple with a Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan.  Think of how have deploying some, or all of your IT infrastructure with a cloud service provider could solidify one or both of these plans.  Based on your business needs and decisions made concerning either your COOP or DR plan, a cloud based service could be a definite base camp.  Additionally,  think of how these types of business requirements would be met by implementing a comprehensive cloud strategy for you IT infrastructure.  How would you plan for a disaster or an outage that affects you continuity if your services already running in different parts of the world?  How much is having a COOP and DR plan that could literally be bullet proof worth to you?

I don’t want to forget the about the issue of security since it’s such a hot topic.  However, I think I’ll save it for a later post.  The fact is, many companies have there data and services with cloud service providers.  Based on my use of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, security starts with the way you configure your accessible assets.  A complete understanding of your providers security model is the first goal to accomplish.  Then you can go from there.

Take some time to muddle over these ideas on cloud services adoption and let me know what you think.