In today’s day and age, cloud computing has been a pretty popular word in the world of Information Technology (IT). There is no doubt cloud computing has played a crucial role for small businesses to stay productive during the period of COVID-19 lockdown. Cloud computing has been around for more than a decade now, and with the emergence of broadband, mobile high-speed Internet, cloud computing is integrated into our lives. If you are on Facebook posting a picture, making a bank transaction using an app on your phone, and streaming movies on Netflix, you are using some cloud computing.
Now for a small business, if you are using Office365 for emails, Microsoft SharePoint/dropbox for sharing files, and using Microsoft Teams, Zoom for collaboration between employees, these are cloud computing resources that are helping to solve different business challenges. In a survey conducted by the Small Business and Enterprise Council (SBE) last year, 84% of small business owners believes cloud services are essential tools to operate their business, approximately 84% the owners believe cloud computing has helped improve their productivity and collaboration, and 76% percent believe cloud computing has been critical for their survival during the COVID-19 shutdown period.
Below, I’ll talk more about what cloud computing means, different types of cloud infrastructure, how it can help your business grow, and how Cygnik Tech, a managed cloud service provider, can help you reap the benefits of cloud computing.
What is cloud computing?
According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet. It’s a digital service that helps you access your data and applications on a remote server with no need to have an in-house physical server or storage disk in your network. Instead, you need an internet connection to access your data on the remote server from anywhere in the world.
Type of cloud computing infrastructure?
Cloud computing services can be categorized into the following three categories:-
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS helps you to replace your in-house IT infrastructure. With IaaS, you can rent servers, virtual machines (VMs), and required infrastructure to operate from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Service, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). All of the major providers have a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS helps software engineers to build on-demand web applications and other applications and not worry about building a server, installing OS, and figuring networking. With PaaS, a cloud service provider (CSP) like AWS takes care of the underlying OS, server, and other infrastructure, and the software engineer needs to look into the code that needs to run. AWS Lambda is one of the examples of PaaS services offered by AWS.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
If you are using Office365 or Gmail, you use a SaaS-based application. SaaS gives users access to software over the Internet. So users need access to the Internet, not need to build the server or worry about updating the software version. All maintenance is taken care of by the vendor supporting the application.
Five Benefits of cloud computing that can help your business to grow?
1. You can reduce your operations cost:
In Cloud Computing, all cloud resources have a fixed price for usage, and businesses pay only for resources they use. So, you can predict what your monthly costs will be and can control what you want to spend on IT infrastructure. But in traditional in-house IT infrastructure, you have to think about buying the server hardware, where it will be housed, purchasing network equipment, etc. Moreover, do you know how much time and money you’ll need to spend on server maintenance, like applying updates, maintaining the proper environment for these servers to operate? So, looking at the cost incurred in managing in-house IT infrastructure, it makes sense for many small businesses to migrate to the cloud.
2. Compete with big players in the market
Cloud computing provides a level playing field for small businesses to compete with other companies with more budget to afford the latest technology to promote and sell services. Now, a small business with a low budget and no IT expertise can have a website, email, and other essential services ready to support the business with a few clicks.
3. It makes collaboration between teams easy
Cloud computing has made it easy to access your applications if connected to the Internet. With the advent of smartphones, almost all cloud services have their app for you to access services like emails, files, and join meetings from your phone.
The flexibility helps increase productivity and collaboration between employees. In addition, with the flexibility, small businesses get access to a pool of high skilled labors outside their local region. This wasn’t possible without cloud computing because internal resources were unavailable over the Internet.
4. It is much more secure than your in-house IT infrastructure
No business is immune to cybersecurity attacks; Cybercriminals don’t discriminate between the size of businesses. As per this article, 61% of organizations worldwide experienced a ransomware attack in 2020, and the ransomware losses are already 300% more than last year. So as a business owner, it’s all the more important to think about securing your business from these cyber-attacks. So how can migrating to cloud services help? Cloud service providers are well-versed in cyber security. The cloud service providers are responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure and applying regular updates to fix any vulnerabilities discovered in the operating system.
No one can defend against 100% from all cyber security attacks, so you have to have a good disaster recovery plan. For example, in ransomware, you need to make sure you have a good data backup, and cloud services make this all easy. In case of a disaster, Cloud services can provide an easy data recovery service if you need to recover any lost data.
5. No need to hire IT experts to manage server infrastructure
Your business is not going to stay small for long. You’ll look into expanding your operations – maybe adding more customers or expanding to other countries, or demand during a specific season like Black Friday shopping. You need your IT infrastructure to support your business growth with all of this. Migrating to cloud computing services helps you in tackle these scenarios. With cloud services, you can have your IT infrastructure anywhere globally, with resources that can scale up or down based on your business’s demand. In addition, cloud services let you focus more on ways to grow your business and let the cloud service provider handle all the server maintenance tasks.
How can Cygnik Tech, a managed IT service provider help you migrate to the cloud?
Cygnik Tech provides Managed Cloud Solutions to help your business migrate to the cloud. We have years of experience supporting customers in their cloud journey and allowing them to enjoy cloud computing benefits while reducing overall costs.
Cygnik Tech can help you with:
Building Cloud Migration Strategies
Current in-house application assessment for cloud migration
Cloud Security and Governance2
Support SaaS applications like G Suite and O365
Provide Cloud-Based Management Software
Cloud Infrastructure Support
Office 365 Troubleshooting