Nearly 70% of businesses are planning to, or already have, made the move to cloud-based computing for some of their services. The cloud is the wave of the future when it comes to advancing and improving your business operations and, clearly, many businesses are already making the change. But what is driving this massive shift to cloud-based computing?
There are several benefits of adopting the cloud in your business for essential features like document management. Here are some of the main reasons businesses have identified this as an important change.
1. Cost Savings with Cloud Storage
Whenever you make a change in your business, it needs to make sense for your bottom line. Moving from on-site storage to cloud-based storage is one of the major reasons businesses are eager to make the switch. In fact, the savings from making the change have been estimated at 37%. Why are these savings so significant? It comes down to hardware maintenance and updates.
When you move to cloud-based computing, you are utilizing the infrastructure of the cloud provider rather than your own infrastructure. This means that the cost of maintenance, updating equipment, and managing software on the devices becomes the responsibility of the service provider.
2. Cloud Storage Provides Convenience
Businesses are increasingly becoming more mobile as technology enables them to do so. Of course, employees still have to be able to access and share files when they are working outside of the office. With cloud-based storage, users can easily access the files they need wherever they are located. This enables your employees to focus on the tasks that can actually drive growth in your business like meeting face-to-face with clients or prospecting for new business.
3. Flexibility and Scalability
As your business grows, you need your computing services to grow with it. If you are managing your own equipment, this means increased cost as you install new infrastructure and more costs to maintain that equipment. With cloud-based computing, you can simply purchase more storage or computing power to meet your needs and, best of all, have instant access to that expanded capability.
4. Cutting-Edge Security
It’s hard not to turn on the daily news and see a story about the latest major data breach. While cloud-based computing isn’t 100 percent secure, your business does get the benefit of regular security updates. Most importantly, the cost and management of the new security doesn’t fall in your lap. Many cloud providers are also implementing artificial intelligence to help identify and track down the latest threats to provide even greater security.
5. Suited to Your Unique Needs and Budget
Many businesses experience increased periods of work. Retailers, for example, will see a major uptick in activity around the holiday season. With on-premise network and storage infrastructure, you don’t have the ability to increase or decrease the power of your infrastructure as needed. Rather, you have to maintain the maximum capabilities needed even during slow times.
With SaaS cloud-based computing, your needs can dictate what you pay for. Increase your capabilities during busy seasons and save money during slow seasons.
6. Rapid Disaster Recovery
A fire or flood in your business could be devastating if you store data on-premise. Not only do you need to recover data, you may need to replace infrastructure at a very high cost. This can lead to prolonged downtime, increased expenses, and lost revenue.
With cloud-based computing and cloud-based storage, a disaster in your business doesn’t mean you have to go completely dark. Your data is stored and backed up across several data storage centers. Even a disaster at one storage center can be overcome quickly with redundancy thanks to other storage centers and backups.
7. Improve Collaboration Among Teams
If your business requires multiple teams to collaborate on projects or you have teams in multiple locations, collaboration is vital to the success of your business. With cloud-based storage, teams in different locations can easily share and collaborate on documents seamlessly. There’s no need to install additional network infrastructure to connect your on-premise equipment and storage with off-premise teams.
8. Enable More Efficient Document Storage and Review
With advanced capture and cloud storage, documents can instantly be analyzed and stored in a way that makes it easy for your business to access and review documents. This can be incredibly handy if you are in the process of going through an audit.
How Cloud Computing Can Work for Your Own Business
As you can see, there are a number of benefits leading many businesses to embrace cloud computing. You could help reduce costs in your own business, enable your staff to do their best work, improve your operational efficiency, and connect your remote teams and employees to essential business processes. The possibilities are endless with help from the cloud.
Contact us at Intellinetics today to learn about all of the unique benefits of moving your business to the cloud with a free demo.
