Companies of all sizes are migrating to the cloud. The public cloud service market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023 worldwide. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service, and 30% of all IT budgets are allocated to cloud computing. If you’re still on the fence about moving to the cloud, here are 15 essential benefits of cloud services you can’t afford to ignore.
1. Lower Upfront Investment
You don’t have to make a substantial upfront investment to use cloud services. Since most of them are subscription-based, you only pay for the features and capacities you need when you need them. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on perpetual licenses upfront or purchase new hardware to support on-premise solutions.
When you use our infrastructure-as-a-service solution, you only spend money on the computing capacity and data storage you consumed—turning CapEx into OpEx to improve your financial health and agility.
2. Reduce Maintenance Costs
Your cloud services provider will take care of updates, patches, and maintenance, so you don’t need to hire or maintain a large IT team for these ongoing tasks. Plus, you’ll have access to the latest features to stay current with market demands. You can lower your IT overhead and streamline operations without compromising performance and security.
Our infrastructure-as-a-service solution handles all the day-to-day maintenance tasks so you can focus your IT resources on growth and strategic initiatives.
3. Increase Flexibility
Cloud services, such as desktop-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service, and recovery-as-a-service, allows you to meet your business and IT needs whenever they arise. You don’t have to go through a lengthy and costly process to upgrade your IT infrastructure. You can improve operational efficiency quickly and access the right capabilities to meet fast-changing market demands.
4. Enhance Scalability
With cloud computing, you can quickly ramp up your services, increasing capacity, and adding users to support a surge in demand or business growth. For example, our desktop-as-a-service solution allows you to remove or add users in minutes to adjust for seasonality, respond to fluctuations in business trends, or deploy apps quickly to meet business requirements on demand.
5. Shorten Time to Value
You can spin up new cloud computing instances in seconds to test new ideas and design application architecture without the constraints of on-site hardware limitations and slow procurement processes. Cloud services can help you reduce deployment time and improve agility while shortening the time to market to gain market shares, stay ahead of your competitors, and realize your ROI faster.
6. Improve Data Security
It’s challenging for most IT departments with limited resources to keep up with fast-evolving cybersecurity best practices. Reputable cloud services providers have dedicated security teams to monitor their infrastructures and implement security patches to protect your data from the latest cyber threats. In fact, 94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud.
Our security-as-a-service solution allows you to take advantage of the latest security products to reduce the costs, risks, and complexity of implementing a comprehensive cybersecurity solution for your IT infrastructure.
7. Ensure Regulatory Compliance
It’s more challenging than ever for businesses to navigate a labyrinth of data privacy laws (e.g., HIPAA, PCI-DSS) and data security frameworks (e.g., NIST 800, SOC 2.) Cloud service providers have dedicated experts to ensure that their infrastructures and processes are compliant with specific regulations. 91% of businesses said that the cloud has made it easier to meet government compliance requirements.
Our infrastructure-as-a-service solution integrates firewalls, encryption, access control, and disaster recovery capabilities into the infrastructure to help you streamline your compliance effort without added costs.
8. Support Mobility and Remote Work
With remote and hybrid work becoming the norm, companies must allow employees to access corporate data and applications from anywhere using any device—whether they’re working from home, on the go, or in the field. Cloud services enable end-users to update files and access information in real-time so everyone can stay in the loop and make accurate decisions, ensuring seamless collaboration among remote and distributed teams.
9. Enhance Communication
Secure cloud platforms allow employees, vendors, partners, and customers to share information and communicate seamlessly synchronously and asynchronously and in different formats, such as audio calls, video conferencing, screen sharing, file sharing, and more. You can increase operational cost-efficiency, improve business processes, and enhance customer service by managing your communications from a central location.
10. Increase Productivity
Cloud-based applications offer the latest productivity tools to help your employees become more effective and efficient at their job. For example, our managed services for Microsoft 365 help you build your perfect Microsoft environment with the right productivity tools to meet your needs. We also offer a dedicated end-user help desk and monitoring at a predictable monthly cost, so you don’t have to worry about hiring internal resources for support.
11. Improve Data Quality
A cloud-based system stores all your data and documents in a central location so everyone can access the latest information in real-time. The single source of truth helps maintain data consistency, minimize errors and delays, avoid version control issues, and track all edits and updates. You can break down data silos, facilitate data-sharing across the organization, and ensure data integrity and governance.
12. Ensure Business Continuity
Building business resiliency is key to minimizing costly downtime that could impact productivity, revenue, and brand reputation. When you use a cloud-based backup service, you can rest assured that your data is available anywhere and anytime while being protected against human errors, malicious acts, power outages, hardware theft or damages, etc.
Additionally, our disaster recovery-as-a-service solution helps you identify and protect both cloud and on-premises production environments to keep your productivity and revenue flowing.
13. Prevent Data Losses
When your business-critical files reside solely in local hardware (e.g., employee computers and on-site servers,) you could risk losing all the data permanently when the hardware experiences a problem. Data losses can be caused by viral infections, age-related hardware deterioration, user errors, theft, etc. Storing your data in the cloud allows you to access the information from any computer, so you’re not dependent on a specific piece of hardware.
14. Gain a Competitive Edge
Cloud services allow you to access the latest technologies and software features quickly and affordably to meet customer expectations, keep current with market demands, and stay relevant. Meanwhile, you can take advantage of the cost-cutting benefits to boost your bottom line. In fact, 77% of businesses say cloud technology gives them a competitive edge, with 16% believing that the advantage is significant.
15. Reduce Carbon Footprint
Cloud solutions offer a more sustainable way to meet growing computing needs by reducing physical products and hardware usage, cutting down on paper wastes, improving energy efficiency, and ensuring responsible hardware disposal. The reduced use of resources can contribute to your sustainability goal and help satisfy demands from consumers, investors, and shareholders.
The Bottom Line
Cloud services give you the key to unlocking business success in today’s fast-paced digital business environment. RapidScale offers a range of managed cloud services, including desktop-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service, recovery-as-a-service, security-as-a-service, and more to help you streamline your operations and create efficiency. Learn more and get in touch to see how we can help you reap the benefits of cloud services.
Prior to his current role, Jared served as the Director of Cox Business Field Marketing for California and has over 20 years of deep industry experience working for national telecommunications providers in operations, engineering, sales, and marketing. He has a passion for helping startups and small businesses leverage technology to enable them to be more productive through automation, drive improved outcomes and increase profitability.
