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How Can Your Company Benefit From Moving Files Into The Cloud

Updated on by in Business

The cloud is here and it looks like it is here to stay. As a relatively new technology, it has been embraced by some and ridiculed by others. The fact of the matter is, for businesses the cloud can be a business saver when a disaster strikes. It can also allow coworkers to work even closer, making the team more unified, even when its members are spread across the globe. There are many good reasons your company should utilize the cloud.

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Automatic Software Upgrades

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Rolling out upgrades is a pain for most IT professionals. They have to coordinate with departments to let them know when systems will be down. Also, these professionals have to work around the other jobs they need to accomplish to keep the company running. It’s a juggling act. Each year, companies lose almost a month of working time just doing maintenance on their servers. Cloud computing services perform all the maintenance for the IT department. They no longer have to spending precious time working on upgrading software and ensuring security. Instead, projects that are important to keep your business going take precedence.

Lower Overall Expenses

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Of course, cloud services on an enterprise level are not free. However, it can help keep the bottom line out of the red and in the black by lowering the expense of capital expenditure. Instead of spending thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on purchasing new servers, upgrading old ones, and all the additional items needed to install and maintain them, you pay a yearly fee to have someone else worry about those things. Depending what type of service you use and how many seats you have to cover, the over all cost of using off-site products may still be thousands of dollars per year, but it will be less than trying to do it all yourself.

Disaster Recovery

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Probably one of the most important things about having your company information backed up in the cloud is disaster recovery. Should systems become compromised– the information is easily restored. Cloud computing services can perform the recovery process four times faster than the average corporate disaster plan. Typically, an IT department trying to do it all themselves from disks and USB drives will spend about 8 hours trying to get things back up and running. That is time that could cost a business money. Using a cloud platform can restore services within just a couple of hours, saving time and keeping the monetery losses from becoming too great.

Collaboration

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So far everything has been about either saving money or saving the IT department time and hassle. However, there are some benefits for the average worker, one of those features is collaboration. Using the cloud allows team members to work together on a project without having to be in the same room. They can sync apps or share documents with one another seamlessly. It’s a lot quicker and more secure than emailing documents back and forth. Managers monitoring the project are able to see instant updates that could be critical to the program’s success.

Work from Anywhere

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Cloud computing makes telecommuting a real possibility, which allows employees to balance work and life a little easier. Workers don’t have to use precious sick or vacation time just because they have children who are sick. As long as the employee has internet access, he or she can still put in time at work. There have been studies that indicate more people would be willing to take a reduced salary just to have the flexibility to work from home. While it may be beneficial to have everyone in one building to do the job, sometimes it’s more cost effective to allow some the option to work from home.

Competitiveness

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Small businesses may feel they simply can’t out class larger corporations. With cloud computing everyone on the enterprise level has SME access, no matter if it is a company of 5 employees or 5,000. This helps level the playing field a little when it comes to computing, recovery, and collaboration. Smaller agencies simply don’t have the resources at their disposal, without the cloud. However, larger more established entities often rely on systems they have used for years. That means if disaster strikes they are using tape to restore everything, something cloud users never have to worry about.

Document Control

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Companies that use cloud servers to maintain their documentation have more control over these folders. They can set permissions for who can open the data and who can edit information. Time limits for editing a certain file can be strictly enforced.

In addition, instead of sending files back and forth through email, which is not secure, multiple people can work on a document at the same time. They can even chat while they work on it to ensure that the changes that are made are beneficial to both parties.

Security

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According to a recent survey by the FBI, 12,000 laptops are lost or stolen from airports each week. That is approximately one every 53 seconds, and 97 percent are never recovered. That means valuable company information and documents may be snaked away by a thief. However, if the files are never stored locally, the lost device is nothing more than a minor headache.

Cloud storage and computing can allow you to not keep those files on the local hard disk of a laptop, cell phone, or tablet. Instead, a secure portal is used to access documents keeping them safe should the device end up in the hands of a thief. The device can easily be replaced, but all the hard work and sensitive corporate information cannot.

There are many good reasons to trust the cloud with your company’s documents and files. Saving money, and IT department sanity, may be high on the priority list. However, features such as ease-of-access, increased security, document control, and worker collaboration cannot be over looked. With more and more businesses embracing telecommuting and bring-your-own-device policies it is essential to have everything in one localized area accessible by all employees. Ultimately, that is what the cloud has to offer all corporations, big or small.

Author: Denise Sullivan

Denise Sullivan writes for Cloudwards.net covering the latest trends from all things relating to cloud storage services and apps.

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