As a small business owner or an IT professional, having an ICT system which is reliable, robust and able to support your critical day-to-day processes can be the difference between success or failure.
You’ll need to give serious thought to the options available to you – do you go for an on-premise, cloud or hybrid infrastructure?
Do you use physical or virtual servers?
Have you got adequate security, backup and disaster recovery measures in place to protect your network and data should the worst happen?
For many business, the ideal solution lies within the cloud, because it has a number of benefits, including:
Cost – using the cloud over physical file storage can save a significant amount of money.
Flexibility – your cloud network can grow and change with your business.
Agility – giving yourself and your teams access to their files, data and applications from wherever they are enhances productivity and collaboration.
Automation – instead of having to invest in IT support to keep your systems updated and maintained, most applications that use the cloud automatically update themselves.
While there may be some drawbacks to using the cloud – concerns over security and loss of complete control, to name but two — in most cases, the benefits usually outweigh the risks.
Here are some of the ways your business can use the cloud to grow and achieve its goals and objectives.
Data backup
Backing up your data is of vital importance, to ensure you don’t lose everything if your system goes down, your premises get flooded or suffer some other critical setback.
The cloud can simplify the process by allowing your data to automatically update as you work, and you can also create copies of your data off-site, where it will be safe from any local breach, theft or malfunction.
Increased mobility
One of the great benefits of cloud technology is the ability to create fully-functioning mobile offices.
The cloud enables this by allowing you and your teams to sync your data from wherever you are, essentially allowing you to take your office with you while you’re on the go.
Enhanced collaboration
Whether you have an office-based team or employees working remotely from several locations, sharing data over the cloud is easy.
You can back your data up, share files by sending links rather than attachments and can even work simultaneously, in real time, on the same document.
More space
If you regularly use images, audio or video for your marketing and other activities, these can quickly clog up your hard drive, which can increase your IT costs and also make your physical servers run more slowly.
By storing them in the cloud, you can regain your local storage space for the files you need to access every day.
Futureproofing
The cloud is scalable, allowing you to create a plan for your business growth that utilises the benefits of the cloud without a significant up-front investment.
You can start small, and scale-up your usage over time, paying only for what you need, when you need it.
Conclusion
Whether you’re fully convinced of the benefits of cloud or just looking to dip your toe in the water to see if it’s the right solution for you, Spectrum can help.
Our cloud products are available as standalone services which can be blended with your existing infrastructure to maximise the benefits and address any constraints.
You can benefit from limitless technology combinations, maximum business value and flexible, scalable solutions.
Spectrum’s cloud and hybrid solutions provide access to a comprehensive array of suppliers, through which we can provide a complete range of services.
We support them with a clear, simple and effective approach to account management.
