Moving to the cloud sounds easy enough. Getting rid of hardware and the expenses they incur seems like an easy switch! There’s a lot of information about "moving to the cloud" on the web, but much of it is directed at the enterprise market. What about small and midsized businesses? How can migrating systems and applications to the cloud help smaller companies? Below we’ll explore five ways that cloud computing can have an immediate, positive impact on the bottom line of SMBs.
Email is among the most popular IT services to host in the cloud, there are several good reasons why.
On-premise systems are much more susceptible to network outage and downtime than public cloud email services like Google G-Suite or Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium. With your email in the cloud, you never have to worry about power outages, storms, or employee error disrupting your firm’s ability to communicate.
The cloud streamlines the process of adding and removing users to and from your email system by putting management functions into a user-friendly dashboard. Easier administration, combined with the near infinite-extensibility of cloud architecture, means you have no ceiling on the total number of users you can have at your company, or the amount of space they can use for their email accounts.
At Cloud Next ’19, Google announced brand new anti-phishing technology, while Microsoft recently invested a hefty $1 billion in phishing protection. Those major investments in security can help you achieve a high degree of security and confidence with a minimal amount of stress and effort.
Traditionally, businesses have maintained an on-premise file server to help facilitate collaboration. These servers provided a central location for all the files and folders your team needed to share and work. While these file servers have been an acceptable solution for decades, with the advent of cloud storage, they’re no longer always the best option.
Cloud storage services, like Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, allow your business to centrally manage the way data flows to each user and application with a high degree of granularity. This facilitates strong, real-time collaboration between teams, helps remote workers be more productive, and paves the way for applications that can derive greater value from your data, like business intelligence (BI) platforms.
Historically, data back-up and disaster recovery (DR) have been expensive, enterprise-level IT services that required a great deal of expertise and cost to properly implement, but the cloud is changing that model. As service providers automate many of the tedious DR tasks — and leverage the distributed nature of cloud computing to improve reliability — professional back-up and DR systems have become cheaper and more accessible to small and midsized businesses.
Traditionally, line of business (LOB) applications like QuickBooks, the Adobe Creative Suite, and CRM applications were client-server based, which meant that a copy of the software had to be installed on each endpoint.
Today, that approach is quickly being supplanted by the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, in which both the client and server software are located on a remote server, and users access the application over the Internet, often from within a web browser.
Benefits - Line of Business Applications in the Cloud
Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) helps you centrally manage users, applications, and data across your network. Traditionally, an active directory was deployed onin a premise-based server, which of course means buying the physical appliance, bringing it online, programming it, configuring each user account, and then assigning permissions to each resource in the company.
Azure Active Directory provides access to the same resources, with the added benefit that it reduces the high capital expenditure associated with building a new server, eliminates the cost of maintaining that server, and provides greater scalability. Here are some other benefits of Active Directory in the cloud.
Did you know that for every $1 a business spends on print supplies, they spend $9 on the management of their print environment? Centralizing the management of your office printers in the cloud helps your company reduce habitual, non-essential printing, and track the usage of ink and paper in real-time. It also allows for other time saving processes, like the automatic purchase of new ink.
These efficiencies can result in significantly lowered cost. According to market research firm InfoTrends, the savings of managed print could be as high as 41% for paper-intensive organizations like Law Firms.
We understand that the cloud can be daunting for many businesses, especially those who don’t have experience with the cloud yet. But the mix of predictable monthly costs, lowered IT maintenance needs, and increased stability has proven that the cloud is not just an IT fad, but a truly revolutionary technology that all businesses should approach with enthusiasm and interest.
If you’d like to learn how to take better advantage of the cloud, we’d love to answer your questions. Call us any time at 877-832-4611 or email us at info@techmedics.com. Our team is always ready to help!
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