Cloud Apps and Productivity

Cloud Computing Value is Driving Business

Profitability is the measure of success in business, and behind it is some desperation. Business owners of all types are looking to technological innovations to give their business a chance for growth. Obviously everything someone tries to sell you won’t benefit your endeavor, but one aspect that has been gaining attention from business owners is the use of cloud computing to increase company profitability. It accomplishes this by using value.

Face it, your company’s bottom line is tied to your ability to manage your available capital. By shifting your business’ computing to the cloud, you can take advantage of one of the biggest shifts in technology in recent history. Cloud computing allows your business to pay for the computing capabilities and storage it needs, and avoid the headaches and expense that comes from managing and maintaining a comprehensive I.T. infrastructure.

Make no mistake, extra money in the coffers comes in handy for anyone. For a modern business, it can be just the windfall they need to take their endeavor to the next level. This is evidenced by the utilization of utility computing in the cloud. Whirlpool, which recently shifted 30,000 of their employees from an on-premises IBM Lotus Notes system to the Google Apps public cloud email and productivity suite, says the change just makes sense. Global CIO Michael Heim states:

At the end of the day, the capabilities and economics around the cloud computing model are so compelling that when you artificially try to not take advantage of them you impact your ability to compete, because others will take advantage of them.

Cloud computing may not be the answer to all the problems your organization faces, but does project to become a major part of the I.T. strategy for many small and medium-sized businesses going forward. In fact, dissemination of the cloud has entered a point of hypergrowth. Forrester estimates that public cloud offerings that exited 2013 with $58 billion in revenue, will nearly quadruple over the rest of the decade as companies start to replace their current I.T. systems with cloud-based systems. These Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings will basically replace many of the I.T. deployment systems a company currently uses to conduct daily operations.

There are threats to this model, of course, considering that many organizations simply cannot fathom the allowance of another entity, no matter how secure, to host their sensitive information. The fact remains, however, that nearly all public cloud providers pride themselves on the kind of redundancy that the modern business would require to switch from an on-premise system to a hosted solution.

The implementation of cloud systems for database, storage, integration, and standalone components is beginning to appear more like an inevitability than a fad.

At IronEdge, we understand the importance of cloud computing. To learn more about the benefits of cloud, check out our post on the top three ways cloud enhances your business. Ready to move to the cloud? Contact our team to get started today.

Ruben Lombrana