One such technology that’s helping businesses operate faster than ever is cloud computing. This technology helps companies meet their infrastructure and information sharing needs quickly, without the painfully slow and capital-intensive process of building a company-owned infrastructure.
Exactly how does cloud speed of deployment help your business? Here’s a short list:
1: Increased Responsiveness to Changing Conditions
For many businesses, being caught flat-footed when there’s a big change in the market ranks among their biggest nightmares. A business that can’t respond to changing market conditions is a business that’s at a competitive disadvantage.
Managing traditional on-premises IT infrastructure requires a lot of extra tasks that can reduce your ability to respond to changing IT needs in your business, such as:
- Researching vendors
- Comparing bids
- Ordering hardware
- Maintaining hardware
- Ordering, installing, and managing software licenses
- Providing power, HVAC, testing, and maintenance
- Hiring dedicated staff to manage the hardware
These tasks mean that it can take weeks or months to set up or update your IT infrastructure internally. In this time, your competitors can take advantage of the speed of IT deployment to get a leg up on you.
Deployment of new business infrastructure and solutions via the cloud is near-instantaneous, providing an enormous speed advantage. This allows your company to be more responsive to changing market conditions.
2: Rapid Dev/Test for New Business Apps
Businesses throughout the world are constantly developing and deploying business-critical applications. However, with each app deployment comes the issue of making sure that it’s distributed to all employees.
With traditional infrastructure, deploying a business-critical app to every employee that needs to use it can take some time. Worst of all, you might not be able to fully test the app without taking it live on your IT network. So, if there’s a serious, infrastructure-crashing glitch, you’re taking your own network down in testing.
Deploying a new app through the cloud is a different story. Here, an app can be deployed via a secondary, dev/test cloud environment so you can check the app’s functionality without fear of crashing your production environment if there’s a bug.
This allows you to quickly test and deploy new business apps via the cloud.
3: Rapid Deployment of Security Updates
It’s a sad fact of life for businesses that they’re under constant threat of attack from hackers both within and without. These unscrupulous attackers are always on the lookout for weaknesses to exploit in any system so they can steal sensitive data such as banking information.
With new threats coming at businesses every day, it’s important to make sure that your infrastructure has the latest security measures to combat evolving threats. This can be difficult for a business using a traditional internal IT infrastructure.
Most businesses simply don’t have the resources or the expertise to manage and maintain cutting-edge infrastructure security on their own. Even in larger enterprises with plentiful resources, there are always other IT investments to focus on first to help maintain and grow the business.
On the cloud, however, not only do security updates get rapidly deployed to your entire cloud infrastructure, these updates are carried out by the cloud service provider without the need for extra input from your own IT department. This not only ensures the rapid deployment of the latest security updates for your cloud, it frees up your IT staff to focus on activities that grow your business.
Overall, the speed of deployment on the cloud helps your business be quicker, more responsive, and more up-to-date than it would be with a traditional, in-house IT infrastructure.
With the right secure cloud solution, you can build up your business and maintain a competitive advantage without having to worry about obtaining and managing an expensive in-house infrastructure that can slow down your company’s responsiveness.
Check out other ways the cloud can give you a competitive advantage and benefit your business by downloading our Ebook, “10 Key Advantages of the Cloud.”
