Cloud infrastructure and services: how they can make life easier for your business

IaaS

In fact, you can also combine the two things to create your own cloud infrastructure as a service (or IaaS). This would allow you to create, build and scale virtual servers on demand to ensure your infrastructure is always operating at the most efficient level.

For instance, if your business generates most of its sales in the final quarter of the year, should you pay for a capacity that you don’t use for most of the year to meet the demand at Christmas or build an infrastructure that is good enough for most of the year but struggles to cope in the final quarter?

Cloud IaaS takes that conundrum away from you by allowing you to pay only for the cloud infrastructure and services you need at any given time of the year. So you can add more virtual servers on demand to see you through your busy season, then scale back down to a smaller infrastructure when traffic levels die down.

Outsourcing

Cloud infrastructure and services allow your business to avoid the capital investment, staff hours, floorspace and power costs involved in running your own data centre. It is far easier and more efficient to let an external hosting company worry about all of those things.

Cloud-first

There are any number of opportunities presented by adopting a cloud-first approach to your business practices. This is true of any sector and if you’re the first or one of the first to realise this in your sector, the changes can be lucrative. Think of TV and film consumption. Some companies embraced the opportunities presented by the internet to sell DVDs online, but those who adopted cloud-first thinking are now the major players in the subscription streaming market. Give consideration as to how cloud infrastructure and services can become part of your business model.

Communication

From an intranet that does much more than simply deliver the latest corporate missives to public cloud collaboration apps, there are a variety of ways in which cloud infrastructure and services can be harnessed to improve internal communications within your business. If you get this right, it can serve to save time and money, and ease frustrations among the staff.

These general points are just the tip of the iceberg. No doubt there are lots of specific instances of ways in which cloud infrastructure and services would improve your business’ ways of working.