Cloud Computing

Reading Time: 2 minutes

With the bad weather seemingly with us until the holiday weekend and with the Easter Holidays on the horizon many of you may have already finished work for the week. Alternatively you may be at working remotely or from home and will therefore still require connections to your company’s CRM or infrastructure. Increasingly more and more companies are looking at Cloud Computing solutions as they look to move away from expensive server based systems that require a level of onsite support and offsite storage for security.

You may have already used a version of Cloud based software if you have a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail email account. Instead of running the application on your desktop or laptop you will log in via the internet and the software and storage for your emails isn’t hosted on your own machine, it’s hosted remotely in the ‘Cloud’. Gmail users now have a range of options available, all cloud based, including a calendar and a storage option called a ‘Drive’ where files can be stored, retrieved and shared with others all over an internet connection.

 

 

So what are the main advantages?

In short there are massive benefits in terms of cost, maintenance, accessibility and speed:

Costs

• Software licences are hosted in the cloud instead of being installed & purchased for every machine.
• Software updates are done automatically without requiring manual downloads and technical help or guidance.
• No capital expenditure for servers, no maintenance or support contracts and minimal downtime. If a server goes down the service simply switches to an alternative server, all in the cloud.
• Access to the latest in technology and software without the usual upfront costs.

Maintenance

• No Rackspace costs for servers and no expensive, lengthy maintenance contracts.
• The maintenance, support, updates, bug resolution will all be done by the Company providing the services in the cloud.

Accessibility

• If you have an internet connection you can access cloud based services from anywhere in the world and form any internet enabled device.
• Huge speed and practical advantages over ‘remote desktop’ log in type software.
• Sharing information or collaborating on projects is much quicker and smoother with cloud based software.

Speed

• Desktops performance and speed slow down as software and files are added to them, with cloud based services the PC is simply used to access the files and software so speed and performance won’t be affected.
• Far more complex and technically difficult processes can be started as the computing power you need is in the cloud and not on your own device.

There seems to be little doubt that this solution will only gain in popularity. The advantages in keeping pace with the latest technological advances without paying the previously associated costs are obvious and with support included, the headache or lack of technical expertise for companies is also taken care of.

Easy Offices will be moving to a cloud based CRM in the next few months so we’d love to hear from any of the companies out there that have already made the move.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *