“Cloud hosting” is no more a buzzword or a passing trend. It’s truly come of age, with Gartner predicting the public cloud market to grow by 6.3% in 2020. But why this sudden craze for cloud hosting, have you wondered?
It’s quite understandable. Cloud hosting provides agility and mobility to businesses. It enables companies to adapt and respond faster to evolving market conditions and customer behaviours. By harnessing cloud-power, businesses can gain a competitive advantage, which is so essential today.
Apart from that, here are the main advantages of being an “agile” business:
Revenue grows faster
Business costs reduce
Reputation management becomes effective
In this post, we will discuss why businesses need to be “agile” and how the cloud helps them to ace this area.
Top Ways How Cloud Applications Make Businesses Agile?
Take a look at the main benefits of cloud applications to businesses.
1. They Facilitate Easy Scale-Up and Down
There are times when your business may need to scale operations and resources on-demand. By hosting your software on the cloud, you ensure that you are paying only for the resources that you are actually utilizing. In this way, cloud apps minimize wastage and overheads in a big way.
On the other hand, if you maintain huge infrastructures on-premise, there arises a problem of redundancy when you have to scale down operations. You not only lock a lot of capital in procuring extra resources that are no more productive but also incur maintenance costs to keep them running.
2. They Make Business Data Available Anywhere, Any Time
With the cloud housing all your business data, your teams can work remotely from any location. Internal and external collaboration on projects is possible when data is decentralized as with cloud applications.
Your time-sensitive work can go on uninterrupted since all related information is available in the cloud. Inter-departmental projects can run seamlessly if project managers configure data-access permissions correctly.
Compare this with in-house data hosting. A lot of additional work and time gets wasted in getting access to siloed data. Plus, changes and updates done to data do not get reflected instantly and universally, which can be a problem, especially for projects spread across different departments or time zones.
3. They Ease Testing and Updation
Updating systems becomes easier with cloud applications. This is especially true for managed cloud services. When a cloud service provider looks after the updation part of your business, your teams are free to invest their time and expertise in productive tasks. This improves the overall productivity of your business.
Testing is also a breeze when it comes to cloud applications. First, you can reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) since you don’t have to buy or maintain costly testing equipment. Second, tested solutions can be quickly deployed since the cloud manages them. Last, your entire testing environment becomes more responsive and cost-efficient.
4. They Reduce Complexity of Business
In a survey of business executives, 66% of respondents said that cloud applications reduce business complexity. But how does that exactly happen? Cloud makes your business processes simple, improves the distribution of resources, facilitates collaboration between teams, speeds up rollouts of complex business processes, and boosts the ability to access and share business data.
5. They Optimize IT Budgets
Since cloud applications run on the pay-per-resource model, they are more economical for budgeted organizations. You can control capital expenditures on resources and limit usage to stay within your set budget.
Plus, you can easily allocate budget for resource expenditures and do financial planning more efficiently. In this way, you can keep a margin for unexpected expenditures and avoid cash crunch.
6. They Help in Long-Term Strategizing
IT teams are not burdened with maintaining resources and infrastructure. They have the bandwidth to devote energy to customer communications and business planning. In this way, you can meet organizational goals more efficiently.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the cloud boosts business agility and mobility in many ways. That’s why many businesses are moving their operations from on-premise to in-cloud. By doing this, they gain a competitive edge, reduce capital investment, allow teams to collaborate better, facilitate proactive decision making, and plan business processes with ease.
Are you thinking about migrating to the cloud as well? If you need assistance or guidance for the big move, feel free to reach out through the comments section. We are always happy to help our readers. Rest, watch this space for more ground-breaking posts on cloud computing and other IT aspects.
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