Cloud Storage – Should My Business Be Using “The Cloud”? – Grasp looks into the latest buzzword in IT and delves into the ins and outs of cloud based storage.
Cloud Storage – Should My Business Be Using “The Cloud”?
The average business will possess valuable data it has to keep safe and always accessible. Whether this is accounts, CV’s or perhaps just guilty Jpegs of last years Christmas party. Up until a few years ago a business was limited to backing up information to secondary external hard-drives, servers or perhaps dare I say it, burning information to DVD-R (yes we’ve seen it). But all of those options are fallible in that they all have physical reasons they can either fail or be lost (oh yes we’ve seen that a lot too).
Cloud storage is offering an alternative to expensive business owned servers and replacing it with a more unified and streamlined alternative. Take the healthcare sector. Very early adopters of a cloud based system possessing a large centralised cloud storage facility that all individual desktops dotted around the country could access and have immediate access to your medical records without fear of loss or misplacing. One can definitely see the importance of this.
Now essentially cloud servers are still physical devices although your business will have no physical interaction with them. The difference is (as you can see in the above image) they are a little bit more sophisticated and come with a huge amount of redundancy (usually 99.9%) in theory giving its users complete peace of mind. The most familiar cloud storage utilities – Dropbox, Googledrive and Microsoft’s OneDrive have expanded almost exponentially year on year in size such is the demand for more data storage from users.
“Im still unsure”…..
Of course, one issue is slow internet connection = slow interaction with your cloud servers and could cause issues for some. There is a certain expectation of cloud storage providers that this being the 21st century, most business’s should have a reasonable amount of bandwidth available to their business but of course in the UK, we know there are the odd pockets of poor internet especially in the more remote areas. In this instance your business has to factor in that UK ISPs remain dedicated to providing better internet to a wider expanse of areas and perhaps secondly that it seems likely cloud storage is the future whether we favour it or not with talk of cloud based operating systems and the now common place cloud applications on offer.
Its not hard to see why either. Our precious data can be backed up automatically, at increments of our choosing to a state of the art server facility that is guarded 365 days of the year, 24/7 and has almost a 100 percent redundancy ensuring it always has your data secure in some area of the cloud server. More and more business’s are choosing to use cloud based applications to write, edit and store documents and files directly online which means on any computer connected to the internet, you are able to work as normal without the work/home division of computing of old. So as for decision making. Remember, in the mid 90’s it was feared the internet would decrease a business’s productivity? Well look what happened next!
Still unsure?! Perhaps a 60 second video might help!
