The cloud comes in a few different forms. You have private cloud solutions, which are those that a business maintains in-house for their own use, and you have public cloud solutions, which are those that an external business hosts and provides to subscribers. While both have their place in modern business operations, we wanted to take a few moments to focus on the public cloud and the various benefits that it has to offer.
What Are Some of the Benefits that the Public Cloud Can Offer?
Cost Efficacy
For many small and even medium-sized businesses, there is a long list of reasons that an in-house infrastructure isn’t a good fit for their computing needs. Often, the issue lies in finances. Hosting an IT infrastructure can quickly become expensive… prohibitively so.
The cloud helps solve that problem through economies of scale. Instead of a small business taking on the expense and maintenance of an IT infrastructure for themselves, that business can instead acquire what they need—whether that’s specific software, data storage space, or entire platforms—as can many, many other businesses, all renting access from a provider, the one who takes on the responsibility that comes with the infrastructure.
Thanks to the cloud’s scalability, a business can get exactly what it needs from the public cloud for a predictable monthly price. No more, no less.
Simplicity
As mentioned, the public cloud allows a business to take advantage of these tools without needing to maintain the infrastructure these tools rely on. This itself serves as a huge benefit.
In addition to being costly, an IT infrastructure requires a lot of maintenance. Unfortunately, most small and many medium-sized businesses don’t have the in-house talent to accomplish this maintenance appropriately. If you have IT staff on your payroll, consider how packed their days can be between supporting your other team members and building upon the infrastructure you rely on now. Is it really fair to add another major responsibility to their workload?
And, never mind fairness, is it at all realistic to consider doing so?
The public cloud eliminates this conundrum, enabling you to keep your on-site infrastructure lean and optimized much more easily.
Consistency
Nowadays, it’s rare to see a cloud service offer anything less than a 99% uptime guarantee. To be fair, this is only to be expected… cloud providers are motivated to abide by best data protection and continuity practices and should have the resources to do so.
As a result, in theory, you should never lack access to your resources due to an issue on the provider’s end. If one server encounters an issue, another will take its place. This almost certainly isn’t the case in your business.
We Can Help You Manage Your Use of the Cloud…
…in addition to all of today’s other essential technologies for small and medium-sized businesses, to boot. Call us today to discuss your needs and schedule a consultation at 408-927-8700.
